Tech Talks with Taylor

Welcome to Taylor Made Sales' Tech Talks with Taylor podcast where innovation meets opportunity! Hosted by Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, this series is dedicated to keeping Australian businesses informed about the latest advancements in technology and how they can empower their business. Whether it’s discovering cutting-edge solutions, navigating the tech landscape, or finding ways to enhance productivity, Tech Talks with Taylor is your go-to resource for actionable insights and expert advice. Tune in and let’s explore the tech that drives success!

E18: How leading enterprises are de‑risking Sitecore upgrades 02/23/2026

E17: Mastering Cloud Optimisation with Azure 12/08/2025

E16: Rethinking Enterprise Software Support with Rimini Street 11/11/2025

E16: Rethinking Enterprise Software Support with Rimini Street Is your organisation spending too much on enterprise software support and struggling to innovate? In this episode, we talk with Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street, about how Rimini Street is disrupting the traditional enterprise software support model. Emmanuelle explains why many organisations are looking for alternatives to expensive vendor support and forced upgrades. She details how Rimini Street provides end-to-end support for a wide range of enterprise applications, including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and VMware, helping clients save significant money (up to 90% on total support costs) and free up budget for innovation. Discover how Rimini Street allows businesses to maintain their existing on-premise systems for 15+ years without mandatory upgrades, while also enabling them to leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI on top of their current infrastructure. This approach offers increased agility, greater control over IT spend, and the freedom to innovate on their own terms. This is an episode you won't want to miss. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Intro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades slightly and continues in the background) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm thrilled to have Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street in the studio today. Hi, Emman. Thanks for joining me. Emmanuelle Hose: Hi Leanne. Thanks for having me. Leanne Taylor: You're most welcome. Now, this is a conversation I've been very keen to have with you. Uh, we've known each other for a while. And for my customers out there that haven't heard of Rimini Street, who are you? What do you do? And why do my customers need to know you? Emmanuelle Hose: Excellent. Thank you so much. Yes. Appreciate the opportunity again. So, Rimini Street is an end-to-end uh support and services organisation for enterprise software. So, if you think about any organisation in the world, they all run an enterprise software to run their operation, right? So, it's a piece of software that run your finance system, your HR system, supply chain, inventory, if you are producing good or or selling any types of good, right? Large organisations tend to run enterprise applications such as Oracle and SAP and Microsoft, you know, this big mammoth uh software that really are the foundation of their business and their whole system. So, very critical for them. But the problem is that they're very expensive to run. 20 years ago, we'd realised that organisations were paying far too much money and time and resources really supporting this application. We realised that there was no alternative, right? So if you wanted your software to be supported, you had to go back to the vendor to have the support. And the support they have, obviously help desk and people helping them with any problem they may have, but also innovation, right? So, the ability to be able to upgrade and and this kind of things. Uh but there was no alternative, and as a result of that, this organisation was making about 94% profit margin on the maintenance, and so very business, right? Leanne Taylor: That's some pretty big numbers. Emmanuelle Hose: Yeah, it is, it is. So, that caused a number of problem for organisation that run this application. They just did not have enough money and to be able to innovate, right? And as you know, as an organisation, you have to innovate if you want to grow, but you have to also manage your cost if you want to be profitable. So, we decided to provide and create an industry that didn't exist, which was the industry of the third party for enterprise application, okay? So, that's what we did 20 years ago. So, very destructive. Uh we decided to change the model completely, and we decided to make it much more relevant to organisation. Everybody is customising this application, for example, right? And the vendor only support their core product. So, we decided to add customisation for no extra cost. We decided to support any version of the software they were running for 15 years plus, right? So, they didn't have to upgrade constantly to be supported. We wanted our clients to have the choice to upgrade if they saw there was a business benefit for it, and they were be able to benefit from innovation. If it's not the case, just stay where you are and do other things that is more valuable to your business, right? So, all in all, what happened is that we decided to do this for 50% cheaper of the vendor, so being able to give money back to our clients straight away for them to be able to fund innovation strategy. And because we're providing a bigger scope of support, our clients tend to save about 90% on the total cost of supporting this application every year, right? So, it's quite significant, right? So that they have more money, they have more resources, they have more time because they don't have to do this upgrade constantly, and they can really spend all their time innovate for the business to be able to grow. Leanne Taylor: So, Emman, tell me about the smaller end of town. So obviously, your large enterprises where you guys play. I do know, or I'm hoping you do, cover the the small to medium enterprise as well. What do you offer that space? Emmanuelle Hose: We do as well. Well, it really depend on the product. So, for example, VMware. VMware, we found can be everywhere and anywhere, all size of organisation, public sector to private sector, and so on. So, we do support any size for this kind of organisation. We've got what we call a flex model, which will allow them to get access to support as well. So, we absolutely do that. And then we've even started supporting startups. Startups that are coming up with wonderful products that are growing very fast, but they don't know how to do support. And of course, if they can't support their clients very well, it doesn't matter how good the product is. So, we provide uh this same level of support, obviously a bit tailored there for them. Leanne Taylor: Oh, that's fantastic. And lastly, on the Microsoft front, talk to me about the Microsoft support. And probably timely given there I think there was a little outage yesterday. Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. That's right. Yes. So, we are expanding this area actually. We used to support mainly the database. Now we support 365, we support Azure, or the cloud, right? And when we talked about the cloud before, you know, as a platform, you know, the cloud infrastructure uh is something that we support. So, we support Azure as well, which is everywhere. So, we keep on growing and adding more solution to provide again a lot of freedom to our client and save them a lot of cost. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. And I was just looking on your website and I'm looking at Salesforce and Workday. There are ServiceNow. So, for customers out there that are looking at saving some money, if you have any of these applications, I'd definitely suggest you jump out and uh let us know and we'll have a chat with Emman around how they can possibly save you some money. So, maybe touch on that Emman in terms of your pre-sales or what a conversation with your team looks like. Is there a review or how how does that engagement work for a customer to understand what's possible with Rimini Street? Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. So, in terms of providing support, uh it's quite simple. It's it's based on what you own today, what you're licensed for. Uh so, the evaluation is very simple. We ask that our clients share what they are licensed for, how much they're paying today, what version they are running, and very quickly we'll be able to put a proposal in front of them and we'll walk them through what it means to change. Leanne Taylor: Break this down for me with an example. So, if I've got a customer that's an SAP customer, and they could be spending, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars a year on their SAP licensing. Talk me through what that looks like for Rimini Street. So, the support is the same if not better with you guys. Explain that whole process for me. Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. So, most organisations have two agreement with the vendor. They've got the license agreement, which entitle them to use the software for perpetuity. And they also have separate to that a maintenance agreement, right? The maintenance agreement is renewed on a yearly basis, and that's the piece that allow you to uh get access to support and get access to new functionality if the vendor continue to invest in this product. What is happening today is that most organisations are not investing in the product that they have on premise, right, with these two different agreement, and they are forcing their clients to go to the cloud. SAP, for example, have said to their client, by 2027, we won't support you anymore. You have to go to my new version of the product, either grow or rise. And organisations don't have the appetite to do that. Leanne Taylor: So, instead, a new build, it's not an upgrade. That's a, is that a complete new? Emmanuelle Hose: It's completely new, exactly right. Exactly right. And you're talking about million, you know, SAP clients spend millions and millions every year maintaining this application. And an upgrade to rise can cost, you know, hundreds of million up to five years. So, it's very disruptive for an organisation in terms of cost, in terms of time, and resources spent, and not enough of innovation. So, we offer an alternative, right? People can buy time. Hey, I don't have to change now. But how about I save a lot of money and spend this money to innovate now? So, very, very relevant what's happening. And we now support hundreds of different application. So, not just Oracle, not just SAP, uh but also VMware and tons of other application. Why are we doing that now? If you think about the economy, right? Everybody is struggling, the cost of labour is increasing. We've got tariffs, we've got deglobalisation, right? Everybody's really struggling to uh continue to run the business and control their cost. At the same time, there's a lot of things happening around IT. I'm sure you've heard about AI, right? Everybody talks about AI. Leanne Taylor: Oh, just not really. Emmanuelle Hose: Yeah. And you have to use it if you want to control your cost. If you want to automate your processes, if you want to reduce your labour cost and be a lot more efficient and so on, right? So, you have to jump on the wagon. But uh what the software vendors tend to say is like, hey, if you want to leverage AI, you have to change to my new platform, right? What we are saying is there's a different way of doing it. So, we not only help our clients provide a better support and free a lot of budget, but we also help them self fund innovation and now we can help them innovate by bringing agential AI on top of their existing system, so you don't have to change them. You can do that on top of your system because your system is not that used to be called the technical debts, because it's no longer supported, because it's no longer secure, because it's no longer compliant, with Rimini Street, it becomes an asset that is fully depreciated and then you can just spend your time innovating instead. Leanne Taylor: Oh, that's fantastic. So, my takeaway from that case was anyone that's got an on-premise application, SAP, Oracle, what have you, they don't have to move to the cloud with Rimini Street, they can keep it on premise. You can wrap your magic around it, and they're saving 50%, and that puts more money back in their pocket to do things that they need to do. That's exactly right. That is so good. Now, you also touched on something there around VMware. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because we've done previous podcasts around VMware, and there's obviously the Broadcom acquisition um has left a lot of customers in a very tricky situation. Explain to us or my VMware customers what you do in that space. Emmanuelle Hose: So, very similar here. So, when Broadcom acquired VMware, they decided again, we're not investing in this software this way. We're going to put you in a subscription model. So, they were asking their client, surrender your perpetual license that you own, right? For perpetuity. Surrender them, and I'm going to migrate that to a subscription model. I'm going to charge you a lot more for that. So, same thing, organisation were not getting anymore value for it, and the price was increasing quite significantly. So, we decided, no, this is an asset that you have. Keep it. We'll support you for 15 years, and we'll lower the price of having this system into your organisation. So, very, very similar model here. Again, our support is the same for any product globally. It's 24x7. It's very, very reactive to our clients. We answer the phone within two minutes over the last uh 20 years, and we average 4.9 out of 5 in client satisfaction. Leanne Taylor: Oh, fantastic. So, I do want to go back to the very beginning and talk about the name. Can you explain Rimini Street, where you came from? Tell us about the company. Emmanuelle Hose: It is an interesting uh name, I have to say. We are an American company. We are headquartered in Las Vegas. Uh we are very international, so we have offices uh everywhere. We support over 120 odd countries in the in the world, over 6,000 clients. But the name comes from a street in Las Vegas. Uh our CEO, founder, and chairman of the board, uh he was just on the phone trying to set up the company, and they were asking him for a name, and he just looked around and he saw Rimini Street, and he went, that's the name. So, um but I love the because it's unique, and it's also a journey that you take with Rimini Street, right? Some clients actually have created a a verb called, we're going to Rimini it. Why? Because when a CIO come to an organisation, you know, one of the first thing they need to do is like, well, what is my budget, Mr. CFO? What have you giving me? And then he realised, hang on a minute, 90% or actually nine, 91%, Garner's saying now, is consumed just to keep the light on. And you want me to do all this innovation? Your your business is crying for innovation and changes, and I don't have this budget. So, the first thing they do, they will call us and say, hey, can you support this application and help me lower the cost and free my budget, so I can go and do this really innovative thing that the board is going to want me to do. Leanne Taylor: That is so good. So, in terms of a customer moving away from the vendor onto Rimini Street, can you touch on that process? Is that a a week? Is it a month? Is it a six-month engagement? Like how does that work from a? Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. So, the change management component is very, very simple because basically uh the users will just call a different number or have a different portal to be able to access Rimini Street. So, in that is very, very simple. But we do recommend a three-month onboarding. What do we do during this time? The client is still under support from the vendor. So, he has uh the right to download software, the release note, the patch shares under their current maintenance agreement. So, we do all this archive for our client so that in the future, is they want to upgrade to a new version of their ERP or CRM or database. We support database as well. They will be able to do that. So, it's about three months, and then we start planning what tax, legal, and regulatory requirement changes are going to happen next year that we need to start developing. And then we're also going to take the time to put a remote access to their dev or QA environment, because that's how we provide support to our client directly there. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. That's amazing. That's so good. There is So, and I love that I think most of the customers that I've spoken to that are SAP or Oracle or or even Microsoft are not aware that your service is available and that Rimini Street is available. So, I'm very excited to maybe do some lunch and learns and some webinars with you coming into next year and uh connecting our customers with your fabulous team. And uh anyone that's listening, if you would like to know more, please reach out to us at Tailormade Sales, and I would have no hesitation having Emman jump on a call with you or her fabulous team. We do call her frenemies. So, Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. Leanne Taylor: I won't tell you what she called me, but No, it's a pleasure working with you and your team, and I'm really excited as what you're offering. I think it's amazing given that everyone's trying to save money at this point in time. So, Emmanuelle Hose: Exactly right. Thank you very much, Leanna. Really enjoy working with you and uh look forward to doing a lot more together next year. Leanne Taylor: Thank you. See you next time. (Outro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, and here at Tailormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/38977475

E15: Options Around Navigating VMware & Broadcom with Advent One 10/02/2025

E15: Options Around Navigating VMware & Broadcom with Advent One Is the recent shake-up with Broadcom and VMware causing you headaches? In this episode, we talk with Talor Holloway, CTO at Advent One, about why many companies are looking for alternatives. Talor explains how Advent One helps businesses update their technology, move away from expensive old systems, and switch to newer, more flexible solutions. This change can lead to better security and save money in the long run. Discover how this move can help your business run better. This is an episode you won't want to miss Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Intro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades slightly and continues in the background) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here and welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. Today in the studio, we have Talor Halloway, the CTO of Advent One. And I'm super excited to be talking to Talor about some of the really cool things they're doing for customers in the tech space. So, over to you, Talor. Who are you? What do you guys do? And why do my customers need to know you? Talor Holloway: Hi Leanne. Yeah, I'm Talor from Advent One. So Advent One's been around for close to 25 years. We're a managed services provider and service provider in general. We've been helping our customers with a variety of different services over that time, but more recently, we tend to be spending a lot of time helping our customers with cloud adoption, Kubernetes adoption, trying to automate their environments and IT processes, as well as build the operating model around some of these new platforms that they're building future applications on, as well as helping sort of modernise and migrate legacy applications to to more modern cloud platforms. So what we find with a lot of customers is that they don't really want someone to come in on on day one and start from scratch. Really, they want someone who's able to come in and accelerate their project and bring a lot of knowledge and existing blueprints and automation patterns and so on into those projects. One of the things that is different about us is that all of the technology that we recommend and service for our customers, we consume internally. So, what we've tended to do is really build out that capability internally, build a lot of automation and things like that that we can come into a project already being part of the way there and really help accelerate that customer's outcome, rather than purely just sending a services person in who's going to have to start from scratch. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So Talor, one of the really cool things I wanted to chat to you today is about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. It's created obviously quite a stir in the in the tech marketplace amongst customers. And I'm interested to understand a bit more, you know, what does it mean? And what are the options available for customers and what have you been doing in that space that you've seen a lot of success? Talor Holloway: For those who may have been living under a rock, Broadcom has acquired VMware and there's been, in certain cases or most cases, substantial price rises and a great deal of uncertainty around what the future looks like. So pretty well all of our customers have been evaluating their options. Not an exhaustive list, but there's essentially you could do nothing, and there's a cost associated with doing nothing. You could look at an alternative virtualisation platform, or you could go into the public cloud, or some combination thereof. And some combination thereof is really the path that we've been going down. So we've looked at several alternatives from a virtualisation standpoint, as well as obviously moving workloads that are fit-for-purpose into the public cloud. Leanne Taylor: And what have you guys at Advent One, what's worked for you? Talor Holloway: We've been a long-time Red Hat partner and have adopted Red Hat OpenShift. So OpenShift is a unified platform that gives you the capability to run containers and VMs on the same platform. So OpenShift is based on Kubernetes. We migrated completely over to OpenShift earlier this year and have seen some really great benefits as a result of doing it. We've reduced our VM footprint by around 40% due to containerisation and was able to have a really good and highly automated operating model for everything else that's been moved over. So one of the benefits, for example, that we saw was we have an internal application that provides all our dashboards and stuff like that to customers, and on VMware that was using like 184 GB of memory across a whole bunch of Linux virtual machines. Once we moved everything over to containers, it's using around 10 GB of memory. So it just shows the significant efficiency you can get by just taking the OS out of the picture. So there's obviously the operating system, the security agents, and all of that stuff that has to run on top of it to make it work. When we're purely just focused on the application, we can gain a significant amount of efficiencies. And our customer onboarding, the time taken to do that has dramatically reduced. Leanne Taylor: So tell me, have you got some customer examples of where you've had some success with customers? And what does that journey look like for them? Talor Holloway: One of the things that set us up well for this was that internal adoption and taking a lot of time to build all of the automation and the operating model around providing a mature service to our customers with OpenShift. What that's allowed us to do is to help customers move not only data centre workloads but also edge workloads off VMware and onto OpenShift. So we're working for example with a retailer at the moment where we're putting an OpenShift cluster in all of their retail stores, as well as helping some customers who have got, you know, data centre workloads and move those from VMware to OpenShift. And we're also helping customers with OpenShift in the public cloud where there's modern workloads that they wanted to deploy, and we're able to have a sort of a unified experience between Kubernetes running in the public cloud and on-premises or out at the edge. Leanne Taylor: So from an end-user experience, you know, the users aren't seeing any change to how they do their job. It's the tech underlying that's supporting the network, yeah? And the cost savings for the customer in how they architect their network, is that right? Talor Holloway: Yeah, so there's certainly the underlying platform has some significant improvements, but from an end-user perspective, I wouldn't say it's exactly the same. In most cases, it's going to be better. So, we tend to use infrastructure as code and config as code to manage all of these environments. So Kubernetes inherently is a complex platform, but if you have the right tools and operating model orchestrating it all, it can become really simple. So if a customer wants to add a new network or create a new virtual machine or configure network policies, configure storage, do disaster recovery, all of that is completely automated using the open-source tools that ship with OpenShift. And for us, even internally, we were able to use those where our time to do a disaster recovery used to take around an hour for us to fail over our data centre, and we can do that in five minutes now, just to give you an example. So when things are really heavily automated and the platform that you're using lends itself really well to that, it makes things very, very simple. Leanne Taylor: So it sounds like customers can work with you guys to kind of alleviate some of that cost and uncertainty if they are on a VMware environment at the moment. So with automation and cost reductions, customers can see some huge benefits. But going beyond the cost, talk to me more about the automation and and some of the operational benefits. Talor Holloway: Certainly. So, we'd normally go into a customer and do an assessment to understand what the target state looks like. And in almost every case, there's either homegrown or ISV software that we can, you know, move out of VMs and run natively on OpenShift, which from a developer experience or the team that are looking after those applications, it's going to make their lives a lot simpler, and they're going to be able to deploy and lifecycle their software in a highly automated way that's very easy. From a VM administrator perspective, the lifecycling of VMs and the overall management will be fully automated as well. So we use a combination of OpenShift, GitOps, and Ansible. So OpenShift GitOps has allows us to manage the platform itself and have that fully automated as well as the containerised workloads running within it. And we use Ansible for for VM management, so that could be provisioning, patching, configuration management, all that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: So what can customers expect to see, I guess, over the next one to two years? A lot have their investments and licensing coming up for renewal. What's the lead time to have a conversation with you about how Advent One can support them with that next step and what's the timing involved around that? Talor Holloway: Most of our customers have locked in their VMware licensing or subscription for the short to medium term while they figure out what to do. What I would encourage people to do is start assessing what your options are early. We can obviously assist from a services perspective with the assessment and migration and all that sort of stuff. But I'd start planning now because if you've signed on for another 12 months or 24 months, that's going to go really quickly. And if you want to do a large uplift or modernisation as part of that, it's going to take some time. So what we sort of see is two paths for customers where the first path is they'll basically lift and shift onto the target platform and modernise later. The path that we chose, which which we feel is probably the right path, is to start modernising and moving things over on the way through to get to your target state sooner rather than later. But that being said, there's nothing stopping you from modernising things at your own pace. It really depends on the timeline and how complex your environment is. But we're able to help customers with both of those. So to answer your question, I think customers really need to start planning now. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So Talor, who can benefit from the service that you're offering in this space? You know, what sort of industries are you seeing that you're working with predominantly? Talor Holloway: Yes, I think for us, we don't have a focus really in any particular vertical. Being around for so long, we've got customers in retail, financial services, manufacturing, government, education, higher education. There's no real one industry vertical or industry that's going to benefit from this because what we're really talking about is the underlying platform that supports customers' IT environments. But what we can do is when we go to start looking at how to move from something that could probably be best described as a legacy environment to something more modern, we can address looking at data centre, edge, and cloud use cases and what makes sense to go where. The other thing is a lot of ISV software is now being delivered in containers as opposed to, you know, virtual machine images. And we've got a lot of customers who aren't really being given the choice that at some point, you are going to need to consume this software as containers. And that could be for, you know, software running out at the edge, which could be in retail stores, or it could be running in a data centre or in the public cloud. And a lot of customers need help making that transition, as well as having the maturity and a good operating model around it to make sure things are secure, things are patched, things are kept up to date, where in a more modern container-based environment, it's fundamentally different to how a VM environment would function. So it's really getting a good operating model and getting some maturity across while you make that change. Leanne Taylor: How do customers engage with you? Obviously, I'm happy to set up some introduction meetings and things like that, but from an engagement perspective, do you guys run a proof of concept or how does that work? Talor Holloway: Yeah, so our engagement model is pretty simple where we can do things on a project basis or deliver it as a service. There are instances where customers are going to want to try the technology before they look at further investing in it, and we're more than happy to assist with customers running a proof of technology or a proof of value to see whether or not what we're proposing is going to be fit-for-purpose for them going forward. Leanne Taylor: Thank you, Talor, for your time today. I really enjoy working with you and the team at Advent One and we've got some very happy customers already experiencing the shift away from VMware to your solutions. So if anyone would like to further the conversation, please reach out and let's have a chat. See you next time. (Outro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades out) elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades out) /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/38192070

E14: Behind the Scenes of Tech at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix 09/12/2025

E14: Behind the Scenes of Tech at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix In this episode, we sit down with Clint Watson, Division Manager - Technology, of the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, to explore the incredible systems, infrastructure, and innovations that make one of the nation’s largest and most complex events possible. From the track to the grandstands, from data networks to fan experiences – we’ll deep dive into the tech that keeps the race running smoothly and securely. This is Taking Tech with Clint Watson – where high performance on the track meets high performance behind the scenes. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm really excited today. Um we're doing something a little bit different, and today I wanted to interview a customer as opposed to service providers and vendors. And I wanted to hear from a customer about what cool things they're doing with tech. And I'm really excited that Clint Watson, who is the division manager for the Grand Prix Corporation has agreed to chat with me today. Thank you so much Clint for joining. Clint Watson: Oh, thanks very much. Happy to be here. Leanne Taylor: Wonderful. So we connected on LinkedIn and I'm really grateful that you accepted the challenge to have this conversation today. And I think, you know, in technology, a lot of people enjoy the events that we have around Melbourne. Grand Prix's amazing. It's a, it's a global business. And not often people really understand what happens behind the scenes. So I'm really keen to deep dive into the tech with you today and find out, you know, all the juicy details of what actually goes on and how do we create this amazing event. And you know, I'm sure you've got some amazing stories to share as well. So, firstly, how long have you been doing this for? Clint Watson: Just started my 12th year. Probably started at the right time of year leading into a MotoGP event rather than a Formula One. I would hate to think how I could handle going straight into a Formula One brand new, because it's such a big beast. So certainly cut my teeth at MotoGP and then away we go with F1. Leanne Taylor: And what did that look like? What happens behind the scenes there? And what's the lead up time to an event of that magnitude? Clint Watson: MotoGP is a little smaller. It's very different from a tech build because it's a permanent venue. There's a lot of infrastructure there already in play. The crowd numbers are smaller and it's just a little easier to manage. For me from a, from a technology side, MotoGP is probably about a three month planning, six week build and a two week decommission. F1 on the other hand, that's got significantly bigger over time, but that's almost a, a 12 month of the year planning session if not more. It's a public park. It's a greenfield. In the 12 years I've been doing this, I've never built the same thing twice. So it's a significant challenge there. Leanne Taylor: It's going to be one of my questions. Is it the same setup year in, year out? You know, bump in, get it all set up, bump out again. What, what changes? Clint Watson: There's certainly core elements to it that need to be the same, but one of the beauties of running it out of our park is the fact that we have a clean slate to work with every year. From my side, it is, the build's 95% temporary. And trying to build that in a, in a three month period whilst it's still a public park is a significant challenge. But having a space like that means you are able to to innovate and try new things all of the time. It sort of goes hand in hand with the sport as well, right? F1 is arguably the most technologically advanced sport in the world, and we sort of need to try and keep up with that as best we can. Leanne Taylor: So from the ground up, so what's involved? I'm assuming you've got some connectivity, you've got telcos coming in, you're standing up a data centre or your switches. How, how does it actually come together? Clint Watson: I almost act as an ISP in a way. We do have some some incoming services from my side. My role there is I'm responsible for the design and build of the entire network for the whole site, which includes everything from the outside from uh ticket boxes and gates through to partner activations, hospitality suites, media and photography compounds, governing bodies, all the way through to then running the dark fibre for the teams to come and and build their networks on top of as well. So it's, it's quite a large build, as you can imagine. We would then design the network based on the physical design of the venue, how we structure that, we we very much zone that and try and build it in a way to continually enhance customer experience, patron flow and other bits and pieces along the way. I work very closely with the infrastructure team on how the venue's designed and then and then build what what is required over the top of that there. We deliver services from dark fibre through to cable networks through to stupidly high dense Wi-Fi environments for the international media to work from. And one of the biggest challenges there, you've got about 600 people in a space. We base it on to two and a half devices per person, coming from all over the world. You have no idea or no control of what devices they're going to use and how they need or want to connect. But they need to work and work very quickly and have a very high performing network to do what they need to. It's sort of time is money in this space, and the quicker they get their stories and and photographs out, the better paid they are. Leanne Taylor: Absolutely. And what about the guys in the pits, like the actual teams themselves? I'm sure you've got some interesting stories. Clint Watson: I probably don't. I've always seen them as uh, I build a workplace for them to come and work out of. There's a few, a few stressful moments in, in delivering what they need. They're only here for a short time, their requirements change. So there's certainly a lot of long days in the lead up to getting everything right for them. They sort of come in and pretty much build their own little village that they work out of for the week as well. Once it's done, I try to leave them alone and and just let them do their thing. So I I don't have too many stories on them, but a wonderful bunch of people to work with, I must say. Everyone's very understanding of the temporary nature of it all, the challenges involved, albeit with the high demand of what we do. The world's eyes are watching what we do as well. Leanne Taylor: Of course. Now from the, from a vendor perspective, is this like hardware and software and access points that are just boxed up for, you know, 11 months of the year and rolled out for that, that one event? How, how does it work with the procurement? What are some of the challenges you have getting the support from some of the technology vendors when you are really only using it for a certain period of the year? Clint Watson: You're right. It is all boxed up. We we have a shipping container full of racks of switches and boxes of wireless access points. And as I say, it's different every year. that each device is not used in the same way or the same location every year. It really helps these days with the popularity of the event. You have a look at Formula 1 cars and they have technology company logos plastered all over them. And I'm in a very lucky situation where a lot of those companies also want to work with us. So the support I get from any vendor I choose to work with is above and beyond. We try to be best of breed as much as possible, which is hard and it's hard to justify that cost at times, but it needs to work. The world's eyes are watching what you do and if this network fails and in turn there's potentially no safety system, then the cars can't be on the track or gates fail so people can't get in the venue and it's, it's a big risk. Leanne Taylor: So in terms of, you know, the buzzword at the moment is all AI, cybersecurity. Can you talk about some of the challenges or, or what that looks like in this, in this role? Clint Watson: We're pretty much just starting our AI journey really. So I can't sort of can't sort of go into too much detail on that. We're starting to try a few new things in the accreditation and access control space with AI. We'll see how things go at MotoGP. There's a couple of little things we might unveil there this year. Cybersecurity is huge. Our greatest risk as a business is reputational risk. We are in the public's eyes. For example, a few days ago, we advertised our on sale F1 next year. We've already seen new targeted attacks because of that. It happens event to event. I could pretty much build out a calendar of when and how we would be targeted in in different ways across a 12 month period. My view is defend in depth, which we sort of have to. We have multiple layers covering off every area as much as possible. Yes, there's overlap at times, but I'd rather there be that than than gaps. In the event space, it's a bit more challenging. As I said, we have people come from all over the world to come and and build their networks on top of what I provide, and you really have no idea what they want to do or how, or how they want to work. It's a bit of a fine line as well. You need to make a highly available environment that keeps everyone secure, but also enables everyone to do a job at the same time and making changes on the fly during an event is also rather risky and challenging as well. It's a strange space. Teams will come and build their own networks on top of the dark fibre that that we supply for them. They are very sensitive about their data as you as you could understand, and they certainly run off different networks that that I control as well. It keeps me up at night, put it that way. Leanne Taylor: I can imagine. So how many is in your team? Like how big's the team that pulls this event together? Clint Watson: Up until about two years ago, it was just me year round. Leanne Taylor: No way, really? Clint Watson: Yeah, yeah. As an employee of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, it was just me. We would then bring in dedicated teams to to do certain tasks at the event, whether it's, you know, to build and deploy the network on the design. They do then a lot of that support to the media centre and other bits and pieces. and you know, the event would not be possible without having these teams involved. It's been good news over the last little bit where with the increased focus on cybersecurity, with AI, with more, I guess, automation and integration between applications, we've expanded the team in here now. So we're we're now a team of four, which is great. It enables us to do so much more and innovate so much more. Leanne Taylor: That's amazing. When we originally spoke, you know, I said, is this a full time 12 months of the year job for you? But you were actually uh up at the farm doing other things. So tell me how, how do you manage your year? What does that look like? Clint Watson: Yeah. I'll tell you what, I'd be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I do for the rest of the year. It's, it is certainly a full time job. A calendar year is interesting for me. We sort of will start the build early January for F1. And as you say, yes, I do live on a little hobby farm. February is mating season for the sheep. March is F1. Leanne Taylor: Lucky those two don't clash. Clint Watson: No, it all works out really well, actually. And then post F1, we sort of go into debriefs and and sort of audit season and a few other little projects. Come July is lambing season, so that keeps me very, very busy. And then we're coming into sort of September, October, which is MotoGP time. Then I'll probably spend a bit of time at the Spring Racing Carnival after that before uh shearing season and then Christmas and then away we go again. So that's my 12 months. Leanne Taylor: Well, spring racing's another interesting one, you know, behind the scenes, and I have uh worked in a rather large tennis environment as well. So I'm very curious to understand and I love, you know, unpacking what happens behind the scenes at some of these major events. I think a lot of Australians love to go and unless the Wi-Fi is not working, I don't think they really understand what what actually is required and what goes on behind the scenes. So how do you cope with the public Wi-Fi at Albert Park? Because what's the capacity of your crowd there? It'd be hundreds of thousands, I'd imagine. Clint Watson: Yeah, it is. In short, I don't offer public Wi-Fi for that very reason. We are certainly riding a wave of popularity in the sport at the moment. You know, we're up around 140,000 a day in the venue. It's a strange one. Over the last few years, I've worked extremely hard with Telstra to expand their temporary mobile offering. For some reason, whenever someone can't make a call or send a text message, they think it's my fault and and that I am a telco and I can control all this, which is very much not the case. We have worked very hard. Telstra bring in sort of seven temporary mobile towers to help with the expansion in the back haul, and that's improved year on year. Optus too have done a lot of work over the last couple of years to do similar pieces of work. On that though, this year's F1, I built my very own private 5G network on our own private spectrum. First major event in the country to do so. and that worked wonderfully. My initial goal out of this was to just run point of sale off it for the first year for a few reasons. One, just getting connectivity to to these remote locations around the venue is extremely hard. As you can imagine, we have food and beverage outlets that are in the middle of high traffic areas and getting cable to those is risky, unsafe in many ways and having these devices rely on public telcos, as hard as they try, there's always outages, right? So the private 5G piece was very much to try and guarantee some sort of connectivity for the vendors there, but also then reduce the amount of connections that the temporary cells have to, they have to cater for. So it, it worked wonderfully. I'm I'm very happy with that project. I've been trying to get it off the ground for a few years now. I'm very proud of it and have actually had some rather nice compliments from Formula One themselves and they've asked how they can do it in other events around the world too. So Leanne Taylor: that's so amazing. Well done. That's really awesome because I mean, most of these events now are cashless, right? And everyone's tapping and going with their mobile phone. And as a consumer, I think a lot of people don't realise when they're lining up to buy their beer and their food or what have you that you just tap and go. Everyone's seen the spindle on the the POS machine and loves to curse and swear when it doesn't go through. And that's such an amazing use case that you've been able to solve and by the sounds of it be really thought leadership in the the global sporting event space. So, well done. That's incredible. Clint Watson: Thank you. Yeah. and from here, it's just onwards and upwards. There's a whole bunch of different ideas I have. The benefit of having this private spectrum to ourselves, we can carve it up and use it as we as we please. The point of sale thing will always be its primary use case, but with us being able to manage our own physical SIMs and eSIMs, we can then carve off a piece for comms during crisis management times. We can, we can start to look at media streaming, potential new wayfinding ideas with with digital signage and other pieces around the venue and also, you know, maybe look to have a tech advanced grandstand where we can maybe one day stream live onto someone's device if possible. So there's all sorts of ideas floating around as to how we can use it. Yeah, it's been a great project and I'm, I'm very proud of it. at our event. Leanne Taylor: So Clint, can you explain to me how you guys operated during COVID? Because that was a very challenging time for a lot of, or the whole world, but also, you know, running an event could be quite challenging during that time. What did that look like for you guys? Clint Watson: It was the worst day of my career. We had the gates open on a Thursday, patrons came in, you hear some rumblings Thursday night, Friday morning sitting around in the F1 paddock was extremely eerie. And then all of a sudden the announcement comes out that that's it, gates closed, shut down. You put a lot of work into building these events, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and it was rather demoralising to be honest to see all that just be stopped at an instant. We were the biggest event in Australia to be shut down because of COVID. But conversely, once we did get through that period and we're able to run again, we were the biggest event to open up the country again. You have a product like Drive to Survive that was very much consumed during that COVID era. The popularity of the sport's gone through the roof. We sort of didn't know what we were doing really because we just, it sold out in minutes and we just had so many people there and weren't probably weren't really prepared for that first event post COVID. You know, we went through all sorts of plans during that COVID time to different venue designs, you know, just to align with all the all the regulations around trying to run a run an event during COVID, but none of those got off the ground. But there was a lot of lessons learned out of that first one and I guess gave us a lot of good grounding on on how we can continue to improve, change a venue. I think the public's expectations sort of grew a little bit as well. So we've done an enormous amount of work in customer experience, improving patron flows around the venue and other bits and pieces too. And you know, I think the venue we built this year in my view was quite possibly the greatest one we've ever done. So we've certainly come a long way. Leanne Taylor: Amazing, incredible. Were some of the teams already in country when COVID hit and they had to quickly get out of home? Clint Watson: Yeah. Yeah, they they were all here. As I say, it was it was open as a venue on a Thursday. and Friday we were, we were ready to go. Uh that would have been the first day of track activity. There were a few drivers that that got out of the country pretty quick. I don't think anyone hung around for very long at all. And I know that um some of the charities that deal with feeding the underprivileged, they got very well fed there for a little bit with all the food that was ready to go in those hospitality suites for the weekend. So it was it was great to be able to do that sort of thing. Leanne Taylor: Yeah, amazing. Yeah. Clint Watson: But yeah, it was uh, a day I'll never forget and the worst day of my... /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/38191190

E13: Australian Made Managed Security with Secure ISS 09/12/2025

E13: Australian Made Managed Security with Secure ISS Today we talk with Managing Director Paul McIntyre from Secure ISS. Proudly Australian-based and dedicated to supporting small and medium businesses right across the country. At Secure ISS, they believe that world-class cyber protection shouldn’t be reserved for big corporations – every business deserves to feel confident, secure, and future-ready. Each episode, we’ll explore the latest threats, share practical advice, and learn how you can safeguard your business, your people, and your customers. Whether you’re looking to strengthen your security posture or simply stay informed in an ever-changing digital world, you’re in the right place. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales or visit Full Episode Transcript: [(Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, coming to you today from sunny Queensland. And I'm sitting in the office with Paul McIntyre from Secure ISS. Welcome Paul. Paul McIntyre: Hi Leanne, how are you? Leanne Taylor: Oh, much better in this warmer weather. Thank you very much, getting out of cold old Melbourne. I'm really excited to have this chat with you today, and what I ask all my visitors is who are you, what do you do, and why do my customers need to know you? Paul McIntyre: You're right, very good questions. To be honest, so Paul McIntyre, I run a company called Secure ISS. We're based out of southeast Queensland, Gold Coast in particular and uh we do run a a cybersecurity practice and a technical operations practice. So our core offering for what we're doing in this day and age is around sort of managed security operations centre as a service, and we run all of that infrastructure, all of our services out of out of Australia. Our team is Australian based. We're 24 by seven eyes on glass. Leanne Taylor: And that's what I love about you guys. So, you know, a lot of our customers will have had conversations with vendors out of the states or overseas, all offering different bells and whistles, I guess in the security space. What I love about you guys is you're Aussie, you're homegrown, you're based in Queensland, you're Australian made and you're offering your team as a service to customers. So can you explain to me what your security or manage security looks like with secure ISS? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So, so what we've done, our service overall, we've the marketing guys have got a hold of it and called it Lumara. But essentially it's a, it's a service that has a number of tiers across it, a number of technology modules we can plug into the offering and a number of sort of service or people modules that we can plug into the offering. And the way that we've built it out is to to make sure that customers that already have controls in place and and policy frameworks in place that we can sort of augment and uplift those various features across their sort of cybersecurity landscape. So we're not about ripping and replacing the environment as it stands at the moment, it's about augmenting and and taking customers on a journey with that. And that can be anything from that sort of traditional seam piece all the way through to security operations, orchestration and response tooling and then policy uplift and and framework uplift as well. So we're across that sort of gambit and looking to become a true trusted partner to those uh to those clients. To your point about sort of vendors and and potentially overseas companies and the like as well, we've, we've sort of built our SOC from the ground up, so we're not actually reselling another MDR service. We've taken off the shelf software, we've sort of built it out for our requirements and uh made sure that we've sort of got an open ecosystem there as well. So the analysts and and the sales people and the account manager that you're talking to, they've got a lot of accountability and a lot of direct responsibility across that sort of technology tooling and the operational framework that we work within. Leanne Taylor: And what I love is that you really focus on the mid market customers. So that's, you know, your small to medium businesses throughout Australia, and you are nationally covered, which I love. Can you explain how the team, what the service the customers can expect because you're really an extension of their team, right? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So, for a small company, people like to use the word boutique, but I think we we fit that bill quite well. We're small enough that we can customise what we're doing to meet customer outcomes and given our technology heritage as well. So the business itself has been around for about almost 20 odd years and we've had a number of pivots as you sort of do in in technology. And yeah, we've sort of got a significant heritage in the technology landscape as well. So I'm not sure that I've actually answered your question with with what I've just said. You did. The SME piece, right? Yes. So we've made a concerted push into that market space. So in cyber in Australia, you know, for us we come up against everyone. So everyone from the sort of big four Cyber CX to a lot of the small players inside the marketplace. But for us, we think we do a really good job by way of service delivery, we do a great job on on the budget front to really assist that mid market to get a level of maturity that they may not be able to achieve budget wise or uh engagement wise with some of those bigger players. So that's what we bring to that sort of mid market. Leanne Taylor: And that's fantastic because a lot of businesses don't have the depth in their IT teams to be able to, well firstly hire a security manager or or a so, but still have the same issues as large enterprise does when it comes to vulnerabilities, patch management, managed detection, and and of course all the BAU stuff that goes with that. So security is quite a large conversation that we have with a lot of our customers. We spoke recently with a customer around your dark web monitoring. Can you explain what that looks like for you guys? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So dark web's an interesting space, right? Especially all the sort of moving parts in cyber as it stands at the moment, but the key part of sort of monitoring activities in the dark web is is sort of being forewarned about information that might be out there. So for those that aren't aware sort of listening to the the podcast, the dark web or the deep and dark web are the information and sites and and components to the web that aren't available to you through a sort of Google browser or they might be sitting behind a paywall. There's a lot of information out there about a lot of organisations and people personally that's just not accessible via Google and it's often moved around and sort of sold on the what's called the dark web. So through things such as sort of Telegram channels, TOR sites, so components that are sort of off the internet and in private networks if you like. So what we are seeing a lot of out there is is sort of compromised credentials, information that's that's been packaged and repackaged and sold across across those components. So we are finding that a lot of customers do not have that information available to them and obviously being, you know, forewarned is forearmed. So if a customer is aware of of that information floating around in the in the deep or dark web, they can actually action that before it might become a a point of compromise for the business or a or a point of exfiltration for for data going forward. Leanne Taylor: And I think I mean everyone, you'd have to be living under a rock to, you know, not hear that Qantas and Telstra and Optus and a lot of big players have been compromised and they have had some data theft go out of their organisation for whatever reason. So it's really important to be able to see and check your own data if it's on the dark web and being sold to potential hackers. So it's something that I think a lot of IT teams focus on security within their network and within their organisation, but you're right, they don't have a lot of visibility as to what their staff data might be doing floating around and being able to be leveraged to compromise their networks, you know, on that bigger scale. So I think that's a really interesting conversation that we've been having with you and it's not an expensive service. Do you want to touch on on how that works? Paul McIntyre: There's a number of layers, right? So and it really depends on a business's sort of focus as to to what that engagement sort of looks like. But uh, you're not sure whether you're you're familiar with info stealers and the and the like that are out and about to to capture some of this information. But that's sort of where our baseline service uh looks at. So info stealers, as the name sort of suggests is malware delivered in a number of sort of fashions that can capture information from essentially your browser, you know, via a piece of malware, phishing attacks, etc. So that's where our sort of service starts and and you'd be quite surprised at the information that sits in those info stealers. A lot of it's identity based, but there are sort of personal markers inside that information as well. So if you think about your activities that you might do on a on a web browser or your family or your friends might do on a web browser, info stealers can take that information very, very quickly if you were to to walk through a compromised site and the like. And for some of the information that we've seen that's available through that info stealer information is quite eye opening at times. And given how quickly those sort of info stealers can sort of spread and mutate, that information has quite a bit of velocity in that information that's sort of out there and sold and repackaged as well. So we're keeping eyes on on pretty much a sort of hourly basis on various forums and and and the like. Leanne Taylor: Now you touched on patching because I know that's a a big struggle for a lot of customers and again it's just resourcing and manpower. How can you guys help with the patch management? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, so we've we've actually got some some great tooling on the continuous vulnerability assessment and attack surface management and and patching side of things. So a lot of the conversations that we do being being Australian based are around sort of the Essential Eight framework. A lot of the organisations that uh that we do talk to, they're looking at a sort of maturity level one or two across the Essential Eight, but particularly across sort of patch operating systems and and patching applications. So the tooling that we've got available to our customers, we can provide that just as sort of a a co-managed service, so providing licencing and a little bit of advice around your vulnerability assessment frameworks to sort of meet those essential eight outcomes, but also to assist customers on the patching side of things as well. So just setting up patch time frames, potential pilot groups for patching. So those that are that have got more resources will tend to go down that sort of co-managed path and and do a lot of the the heavy lifting themselves, but also the tooling and and the SecOps and tech ops teams that we've got on board in the organisation can provide a sort of turnkey solution for customers as well. So to your point before, right, the technology teams seem to do a great job with the BAU activities and various customers in the SME market are resourced. Yeah, we we see some that are that are quite well resourced from a technical perspective and others that are not not resourced accordingly. So we can we can help with a turnkey solution which basically enables customers to get up to a sort of maturity level two target pretty quickly with a combination of the tooling which makes it quite easy, our process overlay because we've been doing this for so long, but also with the manpower that we've got available to us as well. So as a 24 by seven sort of operation, we can help customers quickly alleviate patching concerns uh across their fleet and and it's not just for Microsoft sort of patching as well, it's across sort of Apple and Linux systems. Leanne Taylor: That's awesome. Now I want to circle back to your managed SOC offering because it is a a brilliant service for customers and I know you do a lot across multiple industries, but namely education. I think when we were chatting, you noted you're up to about 120 education schools or private schools around Australia, which is very impressive. And also the work that you're doing with state government and the councils, can you elaborate on some of the work you're doing in those spaces? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, so we do quite a bit in the independent education space. The foundations of our sort of SOC are that traditional sort of same piece, right? So in education and I suppose in the larger mid market, to be able to stand up a seam, to be able to do the correlation and detection ruling, the deployment is is quite difficult for that sort of market. From an outsourcing perspective or a or a co-management perspective, there are a lot of players in there that sort of price themselves out outside of that sort of market. So we've built that seam SOC offering to to make sure that it's sort of budget friendly and we're sort of leveraging the best of of both organisations in that sort of engagement. So it's sort of a co-managed shared responsibility model where we'll we'll bring the I suppose the cyber threat landscape piece, we'll bring the the security tooling, we'll bring the massive amount of detection use cases that we've got and the heritage that we've got across the education space to overlay that. So the customers are sort of getting quicker time to value for that monitoring and detection service then then they would definitely if they sort of stood it up themselves, but if they just went to a player that wasn't so large in in in those particular markets as well. So yeah, we've sort of built that with a number of factors in mind, but the open interoperability across the technology stack and and sort of that just aware of some of the budget constraints in in those markets that we're playing in. Leanne Taylor: And every business is different, right? So you do some work in government. So the council space is of interest to you as well as well as healthcare. Can you talk about what you're doing with the local government? Paul McIntyre: We run across a number of government spaces. We're sort of doing a lot of managed detection and response services, so typical sort of seam SOC as we've we've touched on, also sort of endpoint extended detection and response sort of technology as well with agent-based technology on assets. So both from an automated response, but also from a threat hunting standpoint as well, and also network detection and response activities in and amongst that as well. So that full sort of Gartner SOC triad, we tend to deliver that into the councils and the like. And we haven't touched on it today, but we also deliver privileged access management solutions as well. So as a sort of project based service or a managed service, we can deliver those in and and help, you know, particularly regulated industries and and councils and state governments with that journey with that privileged access management journey. So everything from starting with just vaulting passwords to moving across to managed managed accounts and then fully securing that access and addressing internal risks and also addressing supply chain risks as well by sort of providing just in time management of accounts and and access into sort of council or state government environments through those privileged access tools. Leanne Taylor: And one of the great things is everything is housed in Australia. All that data, all the all the work that you do, nothing goes offshore, which I know is a big tick in the box for for government. So and I think for education as well, it's refreshing that they're working with an Australian company and all the data stays in Australia. So that's wonderful. So Paul, thank you so much for your time today and I've really enjoyed this chat with you and I welcome all of our customers that would like to continue the conversation around security to reach out and I'm sure Paul would be happy to jump on a call with us and talk about how we can help you. So thanks so much for your time, Paul. Paul McIntyre: Fantastic Leanne, thank you and uh yeah, appreciate the opportunity. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades) your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades) /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/38191130

E12: Cost Savings with Dog & Bone Through Mobile Phone Fleet Review and Management 08/20/2025

E12: Cost Savings with Dog & Bone Through Mobile Phone Fleet Review and Management In this episode, I’m talking with CEO Matt Walton from Dog & Bone - who has been making technology work for Australian businesses through their technology and telecommunication strategies, procurement and ongoing management. We will be focusing on how businesses can get the best mobile deals from their telco and provide their customers significant costs savings! Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and in today's Tech Talk, I'm really excited to be speaking with CEO Matt Walton from Dog and Bone. And today we're going to save you some money. So welcome, Matt. Matt Walton: Thanks, Leanne. Good to be here and uh, yeah, thanks for having us. Keen to uh share a bit of stories about some of the great work we're doing. Leanne Taylor: Excellent. So firstly, Dog and Bone, who are you? What do you do? And why do my customers need to know you? Matt Walton: Yes, people often ask about the name. So Dog and Bone's actually cockney slang for telephone. So, we're actually uh been helping people with Telco for about 20 years. So, we currently help people with tech and Telco. And we work a lot in the not-for-profit space, not-for-profit, government, local councils, health. And really it's, as you say, helping people save money. It's helping people get the right solutions and helping people find the right vendors and partners for their sort of tech and their Telco. Leanne Taylor: That's fantastic. We've had quite a lot of discussion on these podcasts about telcos and everyone loves to hate telcos. Um, the previous episode we were talking about carriage, but today we're going to focus on mobile phones. So a lot of companies out there, small and large, everyone needs their mobile devices, and it can be quite frustrating and time-consuming, as everyone is aware, when you have to engage with a telco, and there's so many different products and plans and, you know, offerings out there in the marketplace, it can be completely overwhelming. So can you touch on how Dog and Bone work with companies to save them money on their mobile phones? Matt Walton: Yeah, so we essentially have two services. We have a once-off project where we do reviews, we do benchmarks, we look at what you have, look at what you need, and then sort of benchmark that against the market. And we obviously deal with the vendors and we understand the pricing and the nuance, how you can optimise your plans and all of that sort of thing, manage data pools, use tech funds, all of those sort of things as to how to get the best deals. But often it's actually just finding the right solution and and matching the vendor with the the client is something we do a lot of. And then when they're with the the vendor, tweaking that to make sure that you're on the right plan. So we've find that a lot where people are on they're happy with their vendor or they don't want to move off Telstra because of coverage or whatever it might be, we can still save a lot of money by getting getting on the right plans and optimising. So that's a common sort of trick that we've been doing for the last 20 years in terms of helping people find that money. And even basic stuff, like where to buy your hardware and making sure you're not paying premium prices and and those sort of things. So, yeah. Leanne Taylor: Excellent. And I think, you know, it's important that, you know, once telcos have you locked into their mobile contracts, they're not going to call you in six or 12 months and go, 'Hey, we've actually got it, you know, $20 cheaper.' You know, they don't do that. So I think it's really important for customers who are in a bit of a cost-saving mode at the moment to, you know, have a chat with you about looking at the mobile fleets and and seeing if you can save them some money. And so I guess when is the right time for a customer to reach out to you? Is it when a contract's coming up? Can they talk to you mid-contract? How does that work? Matt Walton: Yeah, look definitely anytime. Even if you're locked into a contract, there is still always lots you can do. And we help people on an ongoing basis as well. So we have built uh this tool called Telco BI. It's a dashboard that aggregates the reporting and and all your billing across multiple vendors. So even if your SIP's with someone else, or your WAN's with another provider, or your mobiles and your fixed voice, all of that we can present nicely in a dashboard and monitor that usage and make sure you're paying what you're supposed to be paying and you're not getting charged for things you're not using and and those sort of things. So we can help people anytime. Obviously, when the contract's coming up, probably six months before the contract comes up, it's, it is important to do that review and have time to do that benchmarking or analysis beforehand and then go to RFP if you need to or or we can help people renegotiate with their current vendors as well. So really anytime is is is the good time to help. Leanne Taylor: Awesome. And what are the great things is everything's housed in Australia. All that data, all the the work that you do, nothing goes offshore, which I know is a big tick in the box for for government. So and I think for education as well, it's refreshing that they're working with an Australian company and all the data stays in Australia. So that's wonderful. So Matt, thank you so much for your time today, and I've really enjoyed this chat with you. And I welcome all of our customers that would like to continue the conversation around mobile fleet management and cost savings to reach out. And I'm sure Matt would be happy to jump on a call with us and talk about how these guys can help you. So thanks so much for your time, Matt. Matt Walton: Fantastic, Leanne. Thank you and uh, yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades) see you next time. (Music fades) /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/37885815

E11: Let's Meet Macquarie Telecom - Reshaping Telco 08/11/2025

E11: Let's Meet Macquarie Telecom - Reshaping Telco In this episode, I’m talking with Tony Emmanouil from Macquarie Telecom about how mid-market businesses in Australia can achieve better technical outcomes through smarter networking, cloud solutions, and cybersecurity. Tony shares why Macquarie is known as the “un-telco,” doing the opposite of the industry norms, and how their award‑winning customer service and in‑house customer hub set them apart. We also unpack how their federal government‑level security expertise is now available to the mid‑market, the benefits of a managed Azure approach to control cloud costs, and why their SD‑WAN and SASE solutions are leading the way in secure, cost‑effective connectivity. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: [(Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I have been looking forward to this discussion today. I'm very excited to have Tony Emmanouil, Director of Marketing and Channel for Macquarie Telecom in the studio. Thank you, Tony, welcome. Tony Emmanouil: Hey, Leanne, thanks. Thank you very much for the invitation. Great to be with you and your, your clients and listeners. Leanne Taylor: Thank you. Who is Macquarie Telecom, what do you guys do, and why do my customers need to know you? Tony Emmanouil: Macquarie Telecom has been around a long time, for about 30 years now, serving specifically the mid-market. We only have uh services for businesses and we only target the mid-market in Australia. We offer IT services, probably the key headlines are three key areas. One is intelligent data networking, or what a lot of people call SD-WAN or smarter data networking solutions, so linking up all your sites in the best way for these mid-market businesses. The second area is cybersecurity and offering a range of cybersecurity services for the mid-market from network security all the way through to SOC and SIEM and other security services. And finally, cloud services. So, anything from our private cloud services offered in our own data centres all the way through to managed cloud services uh in the Microsoft Azure environment. They're the three key headlines. Macquarie Telecom, I guess is part of the broader Macquarie Technology Group. Our group is responsible for offering services to the federal and state government, like 42% of the federal government is powered or secured by us, by Macquarie Technology Group. Our cloud services business also offers services directly to enterprise. And our data centre business is responsible for our wholesale provision of data centre services. So we build our own data centres in Australia. Uh, we've done so now since 2000. We have six operational data centres in various places around Australia and offer wholesale access to those data centres for our hyperscale tenants as well as large enterprise. So a whole series of services. And the thing that ties it all together is our customer service approach, our customer experience, which we've won several awards, global awards for around the world. And we were fortunate enough a year and a half ago, now two years ago, to have one of the leading authors in the world on customer experience write a book about us, the same author who wrote about Ritz-Carlton and Mercedes and Starbucks wrote about Macquarie and what we do differently in this particular space of customer experience. Leanne Taylor: Now, I've had several conversations with the sales team uh with some of my customers around your phone service offerings and the like. Can you sort of dive into some of those more specific products and and what you're seeing in the market? Tony Emmanouil: The Macquarie Telecom business, of which I'm part of, offers, as I said, the core proposition is our secure SD-WAN or secure networking. Our point of difference is that it is smarter technology. So we were the first company to introduce SD-WAN into Australia and and we are the most experienced and the largest player in that space. SD-WAN now, obviously, powered by SASE, which is the security layers across that. We are the number one player in in the market in that particular area. So any of your clients that are interested in a more secure network experience that is still cost-effective and and makes sense in terms of their business, that should definitely reach out to us. So that's the networking layer. Beyond that, we offer the traditional voice services now either Teams and SIP is the way that they're typically delivered. Mobiles, we're powered by the Optus network for mobility, that's available through us as well. And also managed Wi-Fi. So we have a partnership with Juniper Mist. We offer managed Wi-Fi solutions to make it easier to run your, your Wi-Fi hotspots in your offices. So, they're, they're the main propositions of our Telco business. Over and above that, we also offer the full cloud portfolio to our mid-market businesses from managed Azure services, so we're, we're an elite Microsoft partner. We're one of, I believe only two in the region in this particular space, and we have a very close working relationship with them. We're the fastest growing in this space as well. So, as a result, we developed a managed Azure offering. So what that meant was we found that, and you're quite right about the sticker shock as well, a lot of enterprises and particularly in the mid-market, started expanding their cloud footprint and started adding more and more and more to the cloud with the promise that at some point it was going to be more cost-effective than hosting it themselves or doing it through private cloud. And of course, what happened was it spun out of control where they couldn't manage it in the way they would have hoped and costs start going up, and all of a sudden, the original promise of it being cost-effective just evaporates. And that's where we are now with a lot of businesses now retreating from this cloud-first plan and saying, "Well, okay, I might keep this and this workload in the cloud, but geez, I'm bringing all, all this other stuff back on-premise." And now you have a hybrid cloud environment and it's become even more challenging to manage. So this third phase now that that we're really working well in and being and have been successful in is helping businesses manage their hybrid cloud requirements where some of it will remain in in the Microsoft cloud, some of it will probably move to private cloud as well to make it more cost-effective or because you need those services to be resident and managed in Australia. And some of it, of course, will go back to being on-premise, but you're looking for that one interface and one way of managing all of that rather than going batshit crazy trying to manage three different environments in three different ways and losing track of it and losing the ability to extract those savings. So that's where things are at at the moment. We've been successful in reducing costs for a lot of mid-market businesses in cloud. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. Well, that pretty much sums it up, I think Tony. We're making this a bit of a four-part series, so we will dive into the teleco offerings in the next podcast, followed by cloud, and then the data centre space. So thank you so much for your time today, and I'm really looking forward to connecting you with more customers in the mid-market space that could certainly, firstly need to know who you guys are and and what you offer, and then have some great tech conversations about how you can support them into the next financial year. So thank you so much, Tony, for your time. Tony Emmanouil: Thank you too, Leanne. It's been great to be with you. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/37728550

E10: The Power of Microsoft – Part 2: Productivity & Workflow Unlocked 07/15/2025

E10: The Power of Microsoft – Part 2: Productivity & Workflow Unlocked We’re back with Part 2 of our Microsoft deep dive with Rebecca Cianco from Maxsum Consulting. This time, we’re zeroing in on productivity and workflow. In this episode, we explore how businesses can streamline operations and work smarter using some of the most powerful (yet often overlooked) tools within the Microsoft ecosystem. From automating tasks with Power Automate to building custom business apps with Power Apps and improving team collaboration through Microsoft Teams and Planner, there’s a lot under the hood that can transform the way your team works. Rebecca shares practical insights and real-world examples of how organisations are boosting efficiency, reducing manual work, and creating smarter workflows. Best of all, these improvements often come from tools many businesses already have access to. If you're ready to go beyond email and spreadsheets and start using Microsoft to its full potential, this episode is packed with ideas to help you get started. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can lead to better business outcomes, every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: [Intro Music] Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor from Taylor Made Sales. And today, we have part two of our Microsoft podcast. Welcome Rebecca back to the studio. Rebecca: Thanks for having me again, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: Today we are talking about productivity and workflow within Microsoft. So, explain what this is and what applications are involved and how me and my customers can be using this more effectively. Rebecca: For sure. So, everybody wants to be more productive. There's a lot of recent statistics that are coming out of Australian productivity reviews and studies saying that we're already lagging behind some of our other global competitors in the productivity state. I'm sure that improving productivity and efficiency, whether it be for profitability purposes or to just claw back a little bit more work-life balance, I think it's a pretty important topic for all organisations to look at. And heaps of options within the 365 suite that I'd love to touch on today, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: So, what are these applications? Rebecca: So if we think about productivity and workflow in 365, I guess there's a couple of sub-groups within that as well. So there's tools like Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft To Do that Microsoft 365 subscribers have access to within their existing licence levels. And alongside that as well, there are some other apps that can contribute to moving work through those services to provide even higher level visibility and insights. So, Power Automate, Power Apps, for example, are some additional services within 365 that add even more grunt to Planner, Project, and To Do. Leanne Taylor: Now, I absolutely love using the Microsoft To Do app. I have multiple little folders in there for brain dumps, ideas, thoughts, etc. I know I'm not using it to its full capacity. How should I best be using that? How do customers integrate that To Do app into their wider business? Rebecca: So, there's a couple of things in Microsoft To Do that people probably, you know, haven't thought about. To your point, Leanne, about the brain dumps, absolutely perfect. The Microsoft To Do app for phone, for mobiles, is actually surprisingly effective as well. So I always have that enabled on my phone so that if I do think of something out on the fly, I can immediately pop it into one of my to-do lists. People don't realise that they can share to-do lists as well with others in their organisation. So if you're wanting to, you know, consolidate some ideas in one place, that's that's a really simple, quick win that lots of people can, you know, have a crack at in Microsoft To Do. But also, a lot of people don't realise that whatever you put on your to-do list is accessible through various other parts of 365. So, in Microsoft Teams, for example, if you're a Microsoft Teams user, you'll be familiar with the left-hand menu where all the apps show up. If you click on the more apps or the the three dots button and add Microsoft Planner as one of the apps in your Teams menu there, you'll automatically get a view within Microsoft Teams of all your to-do lists and you can expand out all the items on there. So it just gives you that ability to be able to look at it in the context of the work you're currently doing. Two other areas where that's really powerful is in Microsoft Outlook and Calendar as well. In those particular instances, it's along the top banner of the app and it's often overlooked by most people. If you hover over the little white icons at the top of Outlook or Calendar, you'll find one there that has a, it's like a little document with a tick on it that says 'My Day'. If you click that on, a sidebar will open up and it will also surface your main to-do list and you can filter through and choose other to-do lists you might be looking at ticking off the list that day. That's really fantastic to have it alongside the email to remind yourself, you know, of any notes or any ideas that you might have plunked into to do right alongside the email that you're drafting. And with Calendar, having it open in the side pane, you can even just drag and drop any of your to-dos over to a spot in your calendar and it will place it in your calendar, letting you know that you you want to do it at that particular time slot. So, being able to leverage some of those inbuilt integrations in 365 really give Microsoft To Do even more grunt. Leanne Taylor: So talk to me about Planner. I'm sure there's lots of customers out there that have, you know, a calendar of events and things that they need to sort of plan for through the year. I know I spend a lot of time planning my, you know, the podcast and my customer events. We do tech talks and webinars. So explain how I could be using Planner a bit better because I'm actually not using it at the moment. So... Rebecca: Yeah, right. Okay. So Planner is a really powerful tool and it can be used pretty much as simply or as sophisticatedly, if that's such a word, as you like. So we often recommend people start simply. A lot of people use it as an event planner, like you do or you're thinking of, Leanne, but also to just, you know, manage workflow for a particular team even, through, you know, in progress, completed, kind of, you know, timelines. So it's a drag and drop tool as well. So you create various columns with items that you might want to achieve. So in your case, you know, could be tech talks or in-person events. And they're little modules that you create within that. And within each little module in Planner, there's so much information you can pack into that. You can put a a due date on it, you can assign somebody by using an @ mention to that particular work item, anybody in your team. And you can add notes, you can add links, you can upload files into it, you can put images in there, you can put checklists in there. In each individual module, once you expand it out, there's so much there that you can see. The beauty of putting a timeline on it and assigning it to a person is that once you've assigned somebody a task or one of those little blocks/modules in Planner, then that will automatically show up in their Planner list that we talked about docking into Microsoft Teams before. And it will also ping them a notification in their email that they've been assigned a new task. So that in and of itself is a functionality that is really underutilised by lots of organisations, even at a simple level. But the beauty of having it in Planner is that the owner of the plan can also go in at any time and switch the view from the little modules over to a calendar view. So you can get a calendar of, you know, who's assigned to do what at what point in time. And also get some really simple, high-level metrics about, you know, how many things are on track, how many things are late, how many things were completed on time. So they are all some really powerful tools and insights that you can get without any extra coding, playing around, Power BI building. They're all native to Planner built in. So no reason really not to to jump in and have a go at it. Leanne Taylor: So explain to me with this, you were just saying you can see, you know, tasks and who's done what and timelines, how does that connect into Project? Rebecca: So Microsoft Project is probably the next iteration up of Planner. It is a slightly more big-scale, bigger project kind of offering. To my mind, the majority of organisations can get all that they need out of Planner, but Project is really powerful when you have a very complex project, for example, that you want to drive from start to finish. And it it works in a similar way as Planner does, but there's even more reportability and ability to get insights out of projects. So, you know, creating Gantt charts and connecting it into Power BI feeds and getting, you know, a lot of real-time data on the status of your project. You can add in, you know, some budget overlays and things like that. So there's a lot more grunt in Microsoft Project, which is really around project management as opposed to in Planner, you're really going to be using it for workflow tracking and uh assigning tasks to people and keeping that moving, if that makes sense. Leanne Taylor: It sure does. So, is there anything else in the suite that people need to know about for productivity and workflow? Rebecca: Oh, look, there's heaps of stuff and, you know, the Power Platform part of Microsoft 365 really plays into this space quite heavily as well. So even the Power Automate inclusion in Microsoft 365 licensing levels, people might shy away from that because they think that, you know, it requires a lot of coding. That's not actually the case. Power Automate comes with a fantastic set of templates that, you know, you can try out even for some really basic things. So Planner, for example, will have some automatic triggers built in, but if you want things more advanced, then, you know, Power Automate can give you some extra grunt to what you'd like to do with productivity and and workflow tracking. So a common use case might be, for example, somebody assigns a task in Planner and you want to ask the employee to acknowledge it and to that they've received the task and for that completion or acknowledgement to be tracked in a Microsoft list or an Excel report, or you might want to trigger a notification in Teams to their manager to say they've commenced it, check in with them again in two days. So all of those little additional workflows, notification tools, data collection and collation, all of that operates through Power Automate. Some of them are very quick and easy to stand up by yourself, some of them you'll need some oversight from an IT partner with. But considering that that functionality is already there in 365, that's a big boost to workplace productivity and driving workflows, whereas a lot of organisations might look elsewhere through Zapier and other APIs and connectors to try and achieve the same thing. Leanne Taylor: So that really lends itself into Power BI, like Microsoft Dynamics space. So you're jumping into a probably a more dynamic use case there and the world obviously continues to expand with Microsoft Dynamics. Rebecca: Yeah, I think though, Microsoft Dynamics is its own, its own beast in and of itself. But I think people underestimate the power that Power Automate has just in your regular Microsoft 365 ecosystem anyway. So we use it extensively every day just for run-rate admin tasks, and it really is a big part of empowering the productivity apps that are already in 365 to do that little bit more. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So, for customers on the call that would like to know more, tell us about your review sessions and how you can engage with the team at Maxsum. Rebecca: If you're interested in finding out more about what you can do and how you can better run projects and worklists through your organisation, what we normally do is sit down with you and listen to some typical examples of what a day looks like, what a project looks like, or the way a particular team works. And what we try to do is identify a couple of key scenarios that we can work with you on as a pilot because, you know, learning firsthand is the best way to get up to speed quickly with a new app, solution, or service. And we hold your hand through that kind of pilot project, for want of a better word, help you set it up, keep it working properly, show you the reporting, and also help to drive some of the education and adoption with your team so that once you feel a bit more confident around using the app to its greater potential, you can then move forward and implement it proactively in more areas of your organisation. So, from something very simple to something more complex, depending on whatever your organisation needs are, there's a whole team ready to support interested parties on that journey. Leanne Taylor: So definitely reach out if you're interested. I know the guys at Maxsum Consulting are definitely your friend in the business to call on anytime with any questions around Microsoft. So, thank you Rebecca, it's been a pleasure as always, and looking forward to our next Tech Talk, which will be focusing on collaboration and meeting applications. So stay tuned and we'll see you soon. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/36829235

E9: Teams Calling and Dialpad 06/25/2025

E9: Teams Calling and Dialpad In this episode, I'm talking with Rob Ellis from Dial Pad around phone systems and teams calling. While many businesses are moving to teams calling, there are some 'gotchas' that catch people out and ways to ensure your phone systems keeps working, even when Microsoft does not! We also cover how to save money when staff use international roaming for while travelling. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: [Intro Music] Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Rob Ellis: Too nice to meet you. I uh, work for Dialpad as a channel manager. Here in Australia, my role is to work with partners who are looking to provide unified communications, UCaaS as a service to their customers as well as contact centre and also AI as well and AI related sales tools. So, you know, there's a lot going on in the industry at the moment. AI is a big buzzword. I remember it wasn't that long ago when UCaaS and unified communications, contact centre was a big buzzword. and now AI is is just sort of taken off. But a lot of people don't necessarily know, you know, things like how it's going to affect them in the business, whether they need it, whether they need to be aware of it and all those things. And that's where I guess uh, Dialpad comes in. You have three main pillars of our business which is unified communications or or or basic telephony services which can also be referred to as as as, you know, an MVP product a message, video and phone. Uh, we also have a messaging platform, think of uh something in the way of like WhatsApp. our own messaging platform and then you obviously have a phone platform. telephone basic phone communications and whether the customer wants a desk phone and be able to pick something up and make a physical call, whether they want to be able to use a headset and have a soft phone or whether they want to actually do everything on their on their mobile device. with a provider like Dialpad who's a global provider, you should pretty much be able to pick up your device, go anywhere in the world, make phone calls, videos, and messaging and be able to do it on any device anywhere you need to. Leanne Taylor: No, that's an interesting one. It just has jump in there because I've got a a customer at the moment that's having no end of issues with global roaming and Telstra charging X dollars for when people go overseas and things like that. So, how does that work just as a little sideway? Rob Ellis: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, when you have the app on your mobile device or you might take your laptop with you, I guess when you connect up to an internet connection that's going to give you access to a real world IP, so something you can actually browse and use like a proper internet connection. Basically your your telephone app or the Dialpad AI app will allow you to uh connect into their local uh services and be able to make calls in and out. Mind if I if I go over there with an Australian number, okay, so for example, let's say I'm you know, well I'm in Melbourne, so I've got an 03 number right or a mobile I've also got a mobile attached to my uh Australian app. Um, so if I go overseas and I make a call back to Australia, it will dial out from that Australian number. Um, now you can select some international ones. So let's say for example, you had a business where you did a lot of business out of France or something like that. You travel over to France, you might actually have a you know, a French number uh activated on your service so that when you're to France you make phone calls out of France, being in France if that makes sense, right? and calls in and out. But if you're wanting to make a call back in through Australia, then you just make that call. It just hops off on whatever local presence you have selected or what local uh direct dial number you have. So yeah. Leanne Taylor: So customers would still need to have the global roaming for instance unless they're on a a Wi Fi service. So if they're out in the middle of somewhere and they still need Telstra 4G, 5G or what have you, they still need to pay for that. Rob Ellis: Yeah, that's right. Leanne Taylor: international roaming. I guess. Rob Ellis: Yeah, they've still got to have some sort of connectivity. That is correct. Or they pop in a SIM card, you know, going to give you data, uh then you can make your calls out and back through Australia, which is having uh a mobile phone number attached to the service because you can still make calls in and out like it or as an Australian mobile number. you just use a cheap SIM overseas. If you're calling back through Australia, then you're then there's no charge for that that call effectively. So let's say I'm in New York or something like that and I I don't know what Telstra charge to roam out of New York and make a phone call back to Australia. I'm assuming they charge a bit. but uh what Leanne Taylor: Through Dialpad, it's not Rob Ellis: Yeah, it's just a local call because I'm dialing out of my 03 number or I'm dialing out of my mobile number or whatever. Leanne Taylor: Right. okay. Sorry. I've I've co boshed your around three pillars there, we're back on the first pillar of phone service. the second pillar. Rob Ellis: Yeah, yeah, so contact centre um with some AI and analytics wrapped around that. So think of and and people used to think of a contact centre as something that, you know, 100 people or 200 people are in and they've got headsets on and they've got a an outbound dialer and that that may be the case. that still may be a contact centre but think of a contact centre these days, someone that have a car business, for example, the service centre when people are calling up and calls are coming in to that service centre, they're booking services, they they're, you know, inquiring about parts or that sort of stuff. might only have five or 10 staff. That's actually a contact centre. okay? the the customers are are having inbound calls. they probably need to put some analytics around those calls like, you know, how where the calls are coming from, are they being serviced properly? and things like, you know, is the rep saying the right things on those calls. That's sort of contact centre of features. So we have those from basic contact centre features in that in that pillar right up to the advanced stuff which is like, you know, web chat and what we call Omni Channel, so multiple channels coming in, multiple digital channels. so it might be people on the website sending chats in, might be people using Twitter or Facebook or something like that to come in with their communications. and you might have things like, you know, tone and intent, but also you may utilise AI so that when you're on a call and you're talking to your customer and might be talking to you and getting a quote off you about solar, and then the uh the AI will be coming up and talking to you and giving you some information whilst might be interested in a battery attached to their solar or did you know, you know, we've got promos on this month, you know, mention this, mention that. And the AI will actually live coach you on some of the things that you might want to talk to your customer about or be aware of or not discuss, you know, there be a whole heap of stuff in there that it that that it could learn about your business. You know, you've got obviously the call recording in there and you've got um the ability to uh you know, go back over those calls to see what was said, what wasn't said. integrate to CRMs like Salesforce and Zen Desk and all those sorts of things as well. Then you've got AI for sales, which is which is your kind of top end sales coaching. Um and that will give you information and insight into things that you've spoken about with your customers. Uh it'll give you really managerial analytics on what's happening in the business, what what your customers are talking about. It also gives you the ability to do surveys and NPI and those sorts of things as well. And that's really where it is. It's supercharging your um your conversations, your organic conversations with customers and it's helping you to drive, you know, better outcomes in your business and give you some visibility on what's going on. The other side I guess is that we own our own stack. We're not utilising uh any third party organisations for part of our our core functions, which is which is important because a lot of uh businesses out there or a lot of other players out there, you know, are using third parties. so you have that situation. Okay, where's my data going? who else is getting access to my data if all this call is being recorded? Leanne Taylor: You Australian based or Rob Ellis: No, we're a US company. Yeah. We we obviously are an Australian entity as well. A US company. pre IPO currently. Uh, it's a $2 billion company, thousands of staff, been around about 12 years. you know, really well vetted in the in the US and in global markets. Yeah. Leanne Taylor: So tell me about this uh, team's calling comparison because that seems to be a lot of customers that are heavily invested in Microsoft are going, yeah, I'm going to team's calling and Rob Ellis: Yeah, yeah. Tell me how that works because Leanne Taylor: Sure, sure. Rob Ellis: So team's calling is something that's, you know, a lot of people they they look at the price and they go, okay, this is really good. I can, you know, I'm already using teams. Team's a platform for me. Uh I like it. I got free licensing with Telstra three years ago. and and it does most of what I want. But then they go, okay, I need some calling on this. I want to make some calls out because I want to get rid of my redundant phone system or whatever. And then they find that there are there are things that team's calling just doesn't do. like like some of the really core telephony functions that it doesn't do and you can only use certain handsets. It's got to be team's calling handsets as an example. the recording and the analytics side is really clunky and those sorts of things. So, there are a couple of ways that we can integrate to team's calling as we can do a thing called direct routing, which effectively is at a stack level, uh not an application level. We also do have an application that that integrates with teams as well. Generally we would do at the stack level. so that the look and feel uh on this side of teams is exactly the same. It looks exactly like teams but there'll just be like a plug in from us. we'll actually be driving the telephony communications. they're actually coming out from teams and they're hitting our stack and going out. Um, yeah, look, a lot of customers do go down the path of teams and then they go, it's a great idea but it doesn't quite fit what we need. Yeah. Leanne Taylor: So in terms of the the cost per call, how does the actual call cost work? Rob Ellis: It'd be a licensing cost. so it's a per seat cost to the customer. and then they they can add things on. they can you know add on contact centre or they can add on other other, you know, AI services or individual things. but generally Leanne Taylor: So this is on top of their team's cost as well. so Rob Ellis: That's that's correct, yeah. with us to have the telephony like if you just want to have a direct routing, you would have a telephony component. so you would just get a basic license with um with dialpad. depending on the side of the customer depends on the amount that might cost cost anything from, you know, 12 bucks a month to 25, 30 bucks a month or something like that. Um it it all just depends uh on what they're doing on the size of the customer contract term and all that sort of thing. Um but so you don't have that cost with us. everything is inclusive. so your calls are included, your voicemail is included, your your base license to get the feature sets are included all of that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: Well, I've got a couple of opportunities that, you know, people go, oh, I want to go to teams calling and then, you know, I'm kind of going, okay, well, let's just stop for a minute. Let's have a chat, understand what you're trying to do, how that works, what your options are. So at the end of the day, it's about giving the customer the best outcome possible. [Outro Music] Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at TaylorMade sales, our mission is to keep you our valued customers up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected and we'll see you next time. [Outro Music] /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/35801555

E8: Unlocking the Power of Microsoft for Business Success - Part 1 06/23/2025

E8: Unlocking the Power of Microsoft for Business Success - Part 1 or visit Full Episode Transcript: [Intro Music] Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm really looking forward to today's chat. It's with Rebecca Ciancio from Maxon Consulting, and we're talking about all things Microsoft. Now, this is part one of a series of Microsoft podcasts that we're recording, and I'm really looking forward to deep diving into everything Microsoft. Welcome, Rebecca. Rebecca Ciancio: Thanks for having me, Leanne. I'm looking forward to it, too. Leanne Taylor: Thank you. So, the reason I invited Rebecca into the studio today to talk about Microsoft is on the back of a bunch of customer conversations that I've been having around what other things Microsoft can do outside of the usual applications that we all know and love. i.e. Outlook, Teams, OneNote, etc. And I was talking with a customer recently and one of their goals this year was to actually get rid of a whole bunch of bespoke applications. They seemed to be, you know, racking up quite the credit card bill with all these workplace productivity apps. And in that conversation, I sort of explained, "Oh, well, Microsoft can do that." and there's, "Microsoft can do that as well." and she looked at me and she goes, "I don't understand what Microsoft can and can't do. Can you explain some of these apps?" So, of course, I pulled in Rebecca and we we had a good chat about everything, and I'm still learning the depth of what Microsoft can do for my business as well. So, today, we're going to have a general overview of Microsoft, and then we're in future podcasts we're going to deep dive into some of the the more bespoke applications that uh and use cases for some of the other things that Microsoft can do. So, Rebecca, tell us. Microsoft. Tell us about it. Rebecca Ciancio: Microsoft. Okay. Rebecca Ciancio: All right. So, today we're going to be talking about Microsoft 365. So, just to get started off the bat, I'll just clarify that, you know, there used to be talk of the difference between Office 365, Microsoft 365. Microsoft only really uses the terminology Microsoft 365 now to talk about all its cloud licensing options. So, I'm not going to vary from that language today. But Microsoft 365 is obviously Microsoft's licensed cloud offering, and many organisations when they move to the cloud, having used Outlook on premises before, would have naturally moved to Microsoft 365 as their solution of choice. However, since that time, many people, as Leanne pointed out, are still relying only on Outlook or calendar and perhaps not leveraging the full power that's in the suite. So, the average Microsoft 365 licence probably has about 50 or so included apps and services that are available to everybody on your team who has a licence at the required level. What that means is that people are drastically underutilising what you as an organisation are paying for in that licence fee, and also it's causing them to look outside of the Microsoft suite for tools to do certain jobs that may already be available to them within Microsoft. So, you know, a lot of that has stems from the fact that, you know, we live in an app culture. We all have apps on our smartphones. And the only barrier to entry when you don't have a tool that you think you need is, as Leanne said earlier, a credit card. So you pull it out, you subscribe to a particular app that you think or service that's going to fulfill your need, whether it be to transfer a large file or create a video or, you know, run a project over a Kanban board or something, organisations have gotten into the habit of looking at external tools. So then we end up in a situation where there's lots of unmanaged data and unmanaged services and IT, which we call Shadow IT, existing in the organisation that your IT team may or may not know about, and the organisation may or may not have sanctioned. And there's some substantial risks around that, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: Absolutely. I did a workshop with a customer leading into Christmas last year, and I think we were at 50 plus applications that were being used across their network. So, it can escalate quite quickly. And from my own personal experience and and working with you and Joe, I was using Notion, which is another application, kind of like an internal wiki for collaboration, etc. And then I'd had no idea that Microsoft has an application called Loop. So I jumped straight into Loop on your recommendation and, oh my god, fabulous. Love it. And even now, I'll speak to customers about Loop and they look at me and go, "What are you talking about? I've never heard of it." So, the whole point of this podcast series is to educate and open up the conversation about many of these applications that that Microsoft can offer your business and also to touch on the the security and the data side of that as well, Rebecca. That's a a conversation quite close to you guys as well, isn't it? It's about keeping the data in the one spot. Can you maybe elaborate on that as well? Rebecca Ciancio: Absolutely. So as soon as you're signing up for an app or a service outside your ecosystem, you're stepping outside your organisation's, in inverted commas, data boundary. You know, your digital perimeter. And your IT controls will be set, you know hopefully, optimised to protect that boundary wherever possible. But if you choose a solution outside of your perimeter, then you're exposing your company data to potential breach or loss. So, if someone has downloaded an app or a service and started using an extra third-party solution on their personal device or their work device and then is pumping company data into it, there's a number of risks around that. So a, you lose control of a single version of the truth, and you end up with multiple versions of the truth because they'll bring back the work they do into your ecosystem at some point. Also, what happens then if if the employee leaves the organisation or the device is lost and stolen, you've got no way of cutting off access to the company data that might be in the service or on the device. Similarly, you lose control of any versioning or record history of how your document has changed or your data has changed or been touched over time, which in an increasingly regulatory environment is a real deal breaker for a lot of organisations who need to maintain that audit trail. So, lots of considerations there around the way that using apps outside your ecosystem, outside your digital boundary, outside your data boundary, can really have negative impacts on your organisation's security and your personal security for that matter, too, that you don't necessarily think of front of mind when you're trying to serve, solve an urgent problem and looking for an app to do that. Leanne Taylor: So looking forward to the next part of these podcast series on Microsoft. Let's break down all the different options that are within the ecosystem. So we spoke before we jumped into the studio about, you know, productivity and workflow. So, can you name a few of the Microsoft applications that come into that category? Rebecca Ciancio: Absolutely. So, you know, essentially out of the, you know, 40, 50, 60 apps you might have available to you in your licence, they can broadly be grouped into a number of categories. So, some of them are around creating content. And that's really where your traditional, you know, Word, PowerPoint, those kinds of apps come into play. But what people don't realise to the extent of the productivity and and workflow apps and services that are available within the suite. So, you know, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft lists, and Microsoft to do all work together to provide people with varying levels of task, job or project management capabilities. And they're incredibly connected and integrated both into Microsoft Teams and Outlook that allow you to, you know, track your own simple personal to dos or, you know, the activities of of whole organisations and and teams within it in a really safe and secure ecosystem within your Microsoft 365 boundary. So, we often see organisations, you know, who are heavy Microsoft Teams users, for example, but then using tools like monday.com or Trello or Asana and then, you know, connecting them through a third party APIs into Microsoft Teams to get that visibility without realising that there there isn't any need to use those third party tools. There is that capability already built into Microsoft 365. So, why not use what's natively available to you and you're already paying for it within your licence fee already. So that's a great example of where people often don't realise the extra value they can claw back by using a suite of native solutions within 365. Leanne Taylor: Let's talk about collaboration and meeting as well. That's a topic we're going to cover in future episodes. What does Microsoft provide in that space? Rebecca Ciancio: Well, collaboration and meeting services within 365 really spans how you communicate with people and then how you set up areas to communicate with them in. A lot of people don't realise that over and above your standard Outlook external outreach, Microsoft Teams is obviously an incredibly powerful collaboration platform. Teams calling added into Microsoft Teams, you know, allows organisations to once and for all move off their traditional PBX phone system and take their calling into the cloud. If we talk about collaborating in terms of documents and data, that's where both SharePoint and OneDrive come into play. And there's a lot of misunderstanding about the role of SharePoint and OneDrive for personal users and uh within Microsoft 365, but pretty much everything you do within 365 will be grounded in either SharePoint or OneDrive. And SharePoint is designed to be a group or communal file storage and repository area, whereas OneDrive is really where your personal work files and those that are work in progress and not really ready yet for sharing are designed to live. So there's always a lot of confusion between that, but understanding how the broader ecosystem and collaboration apps work is really stems from understanding what happens in SharePoint and OneDrive. So we like to talk about SharePoint as a bit like the state library of your organisation, whereas Microsoft often refers to OneDrive as the me drive. So we have a me drive where we do my own personal work and when it's ready for sharing, we move it over to the we drive, the state library in SharePoint. Leanne Taylor: Now that was the game changer for me. We did a workshop recently where you drew that on a whiteboard, and anyone that's got any confusion about how to best implement your OneDrive and SharePoint within your organisation, definitely call on Rebecca to come in and and do a high level education piece there because that was the first time, and I've been using these tools for many, many years, it was the first time it actually made sense and how to actually architect my personal network for my business. And I can see and I do hear a lot of customers having challenges with OneDrive and SharePoint. So I'm looking forward to that chat. That's going to be a fun session. Rebecca Ciancio: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's a a really powerful understanding to have about how Microsoft 365 works and understanding how SharePoint and OneDrive underpin the majority of other apps and services that are available in the 365 ecosystem. So, one of the things that we commonly experience is people say, for example, in Microsoft Teams might be using the one-to-one chat feature and uploading or creating files in that chat space and then coming back to them much further down the track and not understanding why they they can't find them. And that's because uh even though Microsoft Teams is predominantly based on SharePoint, if you're having a one-to-one interaction between you and one other person within Microsoft 365, it's going to store that in your respective me drive areas. So, in that situation, you need to be looking in OneDrive as opposed to, you know, working in a group or a team where your files will automatically be stored in in SharePoint. And that same kind of corresponding logic will apply across the whole ecosystem. So if you're having a one-to-one or working solo, that content is always going to land or be saved in the OneDrive ecosystem as opposed to a broader group work or working as a team in your environment where it's more likely to be in the we drive area. Leanne Taylor: The next one we'll be covering off is content creation applications. And this one's been exciting for me to discover with the podcast series and editing and things like that. Can you touch on the content creation apps available? Rebecca Ciancio: Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of those areas where people have traditionally sought a range of outside tools to fill these needs. So, you know, we're all familiar with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There's no need to really delve into that, although with the introduction of Microsoft Co-pilot now, there are substantial wins and gains to be had by integrating a bit of AI smarts into into using our traditional tools as well. But there's a range of other apps available in 365 that people just really are not aware of. So, stream is where the majority of videos that are recorded in Microsoft Teams meetings, so on and so forth, eventually land and are stored. But a lot of people don't realise that they can record natively out of stream as well by going to the stream app. So, you know, recording little training videos in house, turning on the webcam, producing a little how to guide or video, very easy to do directly from stream. And the benefit of being able to do that from stream is you can publish it immediately to a group or a team or a channel from there. Clipchamp is a a newer offering to be available in the 365 suite, and it's really a video editing tool that builds on what stream can do, but is more design and production focused. So you can add your own audio really easily, add in some thumbnails or some imagery. And especially if you're looking to create really short form content that you might be able to push out for even advertising and marketing purposes, lots of people don't realise that that's available to them natively within 365 and so we'll have fairly costly subscriptions through Canva, Camtasia, lots of other tools that they don't necessarily need to be using if they're not running a full scale advertising or media production agency. Leanne Taylor: That's unbelievable. And it's been so helpful already for the work that I'm doing. Another interesting one is people and culture. There's a lot of HR teams out there using a whole bunch of different applications and probably unaware of the capability that Microsoft has in the people and culture space. Can you elaborate on that? Rebecca Ciancio: Absolutely. So people and culture or HR in general, other than finance and accounting is probably the department that will source external apps and solutions to drive their work forward the most. If you think to your own organisation and think about how you provide feedback to your management team, does your organisation run like little surveys, polls and sentiment, employee experience surveys. Nine times out of 10, they'll be run through third-party external apps and solutions, whereas there is a lot of that capability baked into 365 as well. At the ordinary 365 level, Microsoft forms is an incredibly powerful tool to be able to collect data and get some really high level analysis, and within that there are some automated pre-formatted people in culture style tools, like employee sentiment surveys that are really a pre-built and be already integrated into your ecosystem that will present nicely as a Microsoft list or as an Excel spreadsheet as an output without having to use any uh third-party tool outside your ecosystem. There's also a lot of features like the Microsoft people app or functionality within 365 is really, really underutilised. Because if your active directory, if your team of users in 365 is set up correctly when you onboard new users and you actually identify their role in the organisation, people allows you to maintain and manage a really, really robust org chart even within 365. And at any place in the 365 ecosystem, if you're in Outlook, say for example, and you receive an email from somebody new, people is the tool that will show you what their role is in the organisation, what team they belong to, and even who they report to and who reports to them. So it's an immediate opportunity to get a little bit of context around who this person you may not have interacted with in your team is before. But there's also an opportunity in people for people to to customize that view a little bit and put in, you know, their three hobbies or something like that. So that when people do look at who you are in your organisation, they can get a little bit of a snapshot of about what's important to you over and above the email they might have just sent you. So lots and lots of different things to explore and unpack there. Uh, and I would really recommend people involved in HR, team management, uh, or HR teams in general really take a a closer and considered look at what's available to them in 365. Leanne Taylor: The next one which is a hot topic is AI at the moment. So there's been a lot of talk last year and and coming into this year about AI tools and we're getting flooded in the market with, you know, all these different companies that are popping up, you know, promising to record everything and summarise meetings and conversations and integrate into into Microsoft and various teams. Tell us a bit more about co-pilot because it's people have their varying views on co-pilot, so what do you think? Rebecca Ciancio: Well, I'm a big co-pilot advocate. I use it every day. It's replaced a lot of the administrative and and grunt work that took me many, many hours of the day. But essentially, the thing to know about generative AI is that there are a multitude of tools out there. They all more or less do something similar. And, you know, there will be peaks and troughs of which one is slightly ahead or behind others in terms of features and functionality. But they all essentially do the same thing. The thing that they don't all do is protect your data and protect the integrity of that data. So from the very beginning of any Microsoft 365 engagement, especially when we're providing training, one of the the points that we stress is the best way to create a culture of keeping your data secure in your organisation is to stress the mantra that you want to create it where you intend to keep it. So, by that we mean if if you're trying to create something in your your work environment, you should be creating it within the ecosystem where you intend it to live, use and be stored. So Microsoft Co-pilot gives organisations the opportunity to be able to create and generate content and work using best in class AI tool sets from within their Microsoft 365 ecosystem. What does that mean? Anybody can go to co-pilot.com just like they can with, you know, chat GPT and other tools and, you know, use it and get some kind of outcome. But within the 365 ecosystem, if you have a 365 licence and you actually log into co-pilot via Microsoft Edge, for example, using your work credentials, that data... /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/36827900

E7: People placement with Provenio People 06/03/2025

E7: People placement with Provenio People In this episode, I'm talking with Simon Lupica from Provenio People around their unique Education support for schools needing short term people placements for IT and Business Support. Keep things running smoothly with skilled technical resources available for a day, a week or month by month engagements. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining today. My name's Leanne Taylor from Taylormade Sales and welcome to our tech talk with Provideo on human services. Today I've got Simon with me and super excited to be working with Simon on a hot topic across education which is human resources, i.e. IT recruitment. Simon, I might hit over to you to explain who you are and what you do. Simon: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Leanne. My name is Simon Lupica. I'm one of the founders of Provenio partners. Just to kind of take a step back, Provenio partners is a group of companies. We've got three core offerings in what we do, but today we'll be talking specifically about Provenio people and what we trade under Provenio people as. So, separate to that we've got an AI solutions business and an automation professional services business. But in Provenio people, we are a fully-fledged head hunting firm that does both, I guess, gun for high head hunting, but then also we do a little bit of people advisory around recruitment processes and and depending on the the stage and and the size of the company, we run specific projects as well, specifically in the education sector. We have worked across a number of different education organisations across New South Wales and Victoria. In New South Wales, we do a lot with the Catholic Education Office across multiple large dioceses. We've run straight-up head hunting recruitment for them for infrastructure staff, database orientated staff, software engineering, project delivery, but then we've also run special projects where we need to stand up full teams and do capability assessments across those teams. For example, for a federated model across Catholic Education, Archdiocese of Sydney, Broken Bay and Wager, we ran a three-month project to pull NEC out from the organisation who was managing their Peoplesoft function to bring Peoplesoft in house, stand up a team, build a capability framework around what they needed for Peoplesoft development and customisation as well as project delivery. and we ran that end-to-end over the three-month period giving them an entire team by the end of it. Across Victoria at the moment, we've had a little bit of a demand for synergetics consultants. We've been able to provide a range of synergetics people depending on the organisation's needs, but that ranges from SQL developers, first level support through to business analysts who can help some of the schools plan to transition away from synergetic which seems to be a little bit of a recurring theme at the moment. Leanne Taylor: It is. And this is one of the cool things, Simon, that I love uh having these conversations with you because I hear it often across multiple schools that I work with around resourcing and resourcing as we know post Covid is can be quite a challenge. One of the things that I'm hearing a lot of is, you know, perhaps traditional ways of of finding people is to advertise through seek and go through your your normal HR processes, but it's really hard to advertise for a spot for as you say a synergetic skilled person but you only need them one day a week or for a set project. So that's where I think the gap in the market is and you guys fill it beautifully is that you not only do the short-term placements, you can also do the long-term team planning as well. But today I think it was really focusing on you know, what you can offer schools in that short-term placement and I know with some of the engagements we're working on, it's cases when you know, you've got a staff member, a sys admin or the printer managers is going on leave for four weeks and there's a gap within that team and we know most of the the education IT teams run quite lean most of the time. So to have a man down or out of a particular seat for a period of time can add a lot of extra work for the other team members there but also maybe have some gaps in skill set as well. So maybe touch on some of those short-term engagements and skills that you can provide. I know you touched on synergetics and the BA, you know, what other things are you able to to offer schools on a short-term basis? Simon: So, you make a good point at the end, the hiring in general can be quite challenging. We we don't suggest we replace entire capability for hiring for schools. I think it's important for branding to always have a direct channel to the market. Unfortunately, the reality of that is it often creates more work than outcome. So you put up an ad, your reputation then stems on being able to get back to every single applicant and unfortunately history has taught us that general applicants you you're looking at luck of the draw and you've probably got less than 1% of actually relevant talent that you need. So more often than not organisations are creating a little bit of risk when they do do that and while we encourage to have your own direct channels, you've just got to be mindful about the amount of work you're committing to when you do set that up. When we kind of separate ourselves and call ourselves a head hunting firm, we typically don't advertise any of the roles we source for. So for schools, it comes down to the specific problem that they have. Like, you know, synergetics we knew was a specific problem, so we built a virtual bench in that in that regard to go, okay, well when can we call on people, how many of these people are open to working full-time or how many days can they contribute a week and we just share that transparently. So with with one of the schools we're dealing with at the moment, we have somebody who's deployed two days a week who can do up to four and that's kind of on the school to to utilise that as they see fit but then we can also Leanne Taylor: I think that's actually a really good use case as well, Simon because there's a lot of schools uh with that requirement for a synergetic skill set and you know, what we're really excited to be able to share with with our customers is that that resource can become a known person through, you know, three or four different schools and has that education experience and can then not be on call so to speak, but be available as schools have that requirement come up. So, I'm really excited to be working with you on that shared resource model as well where a school can can engage uh with that resource and have them, you know, come in and and solve a few problems if it's two days a week or or for a set project and then disappear and and go and add value to another school and then can come back down the track when that that school has another requirement and that person's now familiar and known. So that's an exciting thing. Simon: The point is, no assignment for us, when I want assignment is typically the same. So where we kind of add the most value is it really depends on on the outcome that the the school's seeking. And every scenario is different, every budget is different, every time frame is different and you know, sense of urgency around what they need to do and when they need to get it done by. in the current case that we're talking about, they've had a backlog of of requirements that haven't been able to be touched while also trying to plan for something for the future. So it's a very specific resource to find, you know, they asked for a unicorn and low and behold we delivered one. Uh had to find a synergetics person who can do the SQL development but then also run the BRDs for for a plan to move away from from that uh you know, having the combination of data analytics but then also business analysis skills to to have as much impact as they're going to need there. The point is look that these people exist out there, it's just a, you know, it's a it's a very specific data driven approach to find these people and know that they're good which for us is is really our differentiator. So as head hunters first and foremost, it doesn't start with with searching for people, it starts with understanding the problem with the school and and what their specific challenges and and what a solution could look like. Then we seek to find the right level of talent to contribute to that. In some instances, we might have an answer for 90% of the problem. but if you put up an ad, you're probably going to get an answer for maybe 5% of the problem and invest a significant amount of time to work that out. So we always advise organisations to use us in conjunction with their direct methods. Don't come to us once you've failed in the direct method because the best person for the job needs to be explored at the same time as when you when you're doing your own direct search if that makes sense. Leanne Taylor: Which leads us into how does a typical engagement work with Provenio. So a customer comes and says I've got a a gap or I've got a resource I need to fill or a seat that I need to fill for a certain amount of time. What does a typical engagement look like with you Simon and how does that commercially sort of unfold? Simon: Yeah, look it it depends on the how that school buys. So we we run a few different models. Some schools prefer to manage to have an existing contingent labour higher pool that they they practice where they they want contractors in there. In those scenarios we set up a service agreement specifically around labour high staff under direct management but then we absorb all of the employment liability for those staff. So any fair work issues and workplace injury if they ever existed, they don't have to worry about that. They kind of we we cover all the insurances. The other mode is down a services agreement in terms of professional services. So where we we've had a master services agreement but then we can toggle people on and off on a statement of work basis as opposed to, you know, a six-month contractor agreement. It's kind of minute differences between them in the in the scheme of things but it really comes down to their back office and how procurement want to want to buy those things. So we can be flexible to make it easier for the hiring manager. Some organisations we find have headcount restrictions at times so they don't want to hire a contractor but then when we frame it up as services and go down the statement of work path, they've got discretionaryx responsibility or permission to to spend money viax if it's pure services. So we set that up according to how they want to buy and how urgent it is. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. And so what are some fun things coming up? Are you have you got some people on the bench so the education guys can use. I know we've spoken about BAs in the past, we spoke about sys admins. what's some of the pool of people that you can offer our education customers at the moment? Simon: Yeah, so we we constantly sit people in in buckets and that's basically on demand. So for education specific, we do have a specific synergetic bucket where we've got people on on that bench per se but generally as well we go by discipline so there's software engineering, project delivery, project delivery covers both project management and business analysis, change management as well. And then we have specific areas like cyber. Cyber is quite broad actually. We've got some good people on the bench that's specifically around cloud security assessment but then we've got some that do more strategy consulting. That doesn't span just across education. It spans quite corporate. I think there's similar challenges everywhere. Education specifically has its own challenges, you know, you've got vulnerable people, you know, minors and then the data is has a whole another level of of requirements. So the point is we understand the differences of those things. So the cyber people that we have available for our banking clients versus our education clients, we understand the difference in data requirements per se. Leanne Taylor: And Simon, you mentioned budget before and I know we touched on earlier in the in the call about the two different ways that you can work these projects and one of them being a service, professional services engagement which has a different sort of OPEX spend as opposed to the head hunting kind of traditional procurement. A lot of people and we hear this often as well when you go to to HR and go, oh no, they're going to go through their traditional seek processes and what have you because they don't want to pay the fee, the head hunting fee. Can you put some light on that and and have some conversation around, is that a misconception that a lot of people think, oh recruit a head hunter, I'm going to have to pay exorbitant fees for that person? What can we be educating our IT teams that we're talking to now to position that with HR? So, while with Provenio people it's not necessarily a huge price tag and and things like that. So that's a common misconception I think I find with a lot of people in procurement is that people placement comes with a big price tag. So can you explain or elaborate on that for us? Simon: Yeah, absolutely. I think... Leanne Taylor: I know you're very expensive, you're so expensive like you know, you're worth your weight in gold Simon so you know. Not diluting that, but you know. Simon: No, no, it's a fair comment. I think for us we we're actually, you know, one we're not expensive in the consulting space. We're reasonable and and there's a specific reason for that and and my personal preference, I've run relationships with organisations for 10 years plus. If you're too expensive, then there's always going to be a better option out there. That's one aspect. So we always try to be reasonable but also sustainable as a business to be able to provide that service. That's one aspect. But you you asked a good question around how do you communicate that to your internal staff, to your HR departments and whatnot. I think the biggest difference and what a lot of people don't put value on that I see day in day out is the fact that we are outcome only. So you're only paying when you're happy with the person and you're happy with the skill set you're getting in front of you. And I think that's probably the biggest differentiator in terms of what happens when you try and do something yourself. If you had to put a cost on every person's time in reading CVs, speaking to candidates that have applied, getting back to them, and then the hiring manager's involvement in reviewing or interviewing, we condense that whole piece down. So we take away all the application element, we take away all the initial assessing. If we send through three profiles to look at, one might be from our bench, two might be from the market, we've considered 30 other applicants and we do all that for free. And we do that all at no risk. No one has to pay for that until they're actually happy with who they've interviewed, who they've seen in front of them. That in my mind has always justified a price tag that comes with the recruitment. We operate, you know, somewhere between, depending on volumes, we operate somewhere between 12 and 20% margins. Now that's always manageable. But then also what we have is the ability to negotiate with these people. So if you speak to someone direct from market, they're always going to, you get a higher uptake on applications for an advertised rate and their expectations are always at the upper end of the advertised rate. We are master negotiators. So we know what's going to get them over the line, what's also going to make them a flight risk. We know what the market's paying. So there's no point in paying someone 20% below market because they're desperate for a job if they're going to leave in three months when the market picks up because then you're back to square one and you've got all the time to train and all those sorts of things. So we consider all those aspects, but it comes back down to the fact that we are a success-only business. We don't charge retainer fees anymore because we back our delivery. Leanne Taylor: Well, thank you for your time today. It's always a good chat, Simon, with you and I'm really excited to be working with Provenio partners and I think you guys have a lot of work to do with our education customers and we look forward to sharing this with the wider community and we're available anytime if anyone would like to have a chat. So, thank you very much and we'll see you on the next Tech Talk. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/36783840

E6: Talking Telco with Andy Suggars 05/05/2025

E6: Talking Telco with Andy Suggars Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, we uncover some tips & tricks when dealing with Telco's (Telecommunication Carriers). Everyone loves to hate their telco, right? More often than not it's a story of time delays, frustrations and little (if any) customer service. It's time to talk to Andy! Enjoy this session as we dive head on into the world of carriage, connectivity, and care - ensuring you, the customer, get's the right telco solution to suit YOUR business needs, not THEIRS! For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Intro music with voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylormade Sales, and I'm really excited to have a long-time friend and colleague in the studio with me today, Andy Suggars. Welcome. Andy Suggars: Hello, hello. Good to be here. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for coming in. So, today we're talking about all things Telco, and carriage, wholesale carriage. Everyone loves to hate Telcos. You know, what does it mean? What do you do, Andy, and why should our customers come and chat with you? So, tell us all that. Andy Suggars: Having worked for large Telcos and service providers over the decades, I've seen the challenges that customers face with their carriage and how that impacts projects that they're trying to roll out. And those carriage services can be delayed, which then impacts the delivery of whatever project is reliant on that carriage service. So, what I've essentially wanted to do was provide a service to customers where they can lean on us, they can lean on our expertise and our contacts within the Telco industry to essentially take away that pain and the requirement of them having to manage what's coming down the line from their Telcos. Leanne Taylor: One of the things I love, Andy, about working with you on these projects is how you go about scoping a customer's Telco requirements. Because obviously, if they're with a particular carrier, whether it's Telstra or Optus, or Aussie Broadband, they're not potentially going to tell the client, "Oh, there are three other carriers in the pit with me and you can have diverse carriage and there's a whole bunch of options available." The Telcos are obviously only interested in selling their flavour. Can you maybe elaborate on what that scope looks like and how you do it? Andy Suggars: What we typically do because we're a wholesale partner for the major Telcos and also a lot of smaller, business-to-business-only Telcos is we carry out a qualification process for your sites and the service types you want to get. So, if it's internet, we'll go out and do a service qualification with the various carriers. Some will say, "No, we don't have fibre there," or "We can't provide a service." Great, we just cross them off the list and move on to the ones that do. Then we discuss with them what capacity and what cost it's going to be. Now, for customers who want to have diversity in their network, we will look at multiple carriers. So, Telstra comes down the street on this side, Aussie Broadband comes down the street on that side, etcetera. We try to get the most diverse services into your site as possible just to mitigate things like diggers going through cables out in the street or a particular carrier having routing issues and that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: And that's one of the things that still baffles me today: so many businesses go offline, if you like, because of a carrier outage. Now, they've all had them and they will continue to have them, but it still baffles me how in today's day and age, businesses are not doing diverse carriage. And whether that's because they're not aware, or they're being sold to by their primary carrier... Andy Suggars: Sometimes it's not available. Leanne Taylor: Well, sometimes, exactly. So can you touch on what diverse carriage is, why it's important, and how it's actually quite simple to achieve? Andy Suggars: Yeah. So diverse carriage is pretty much what it says in the title: having two alternative service paths, whether it be a physical cable, an LTE service, or microwave wireless—whatever it is. You've got the physical diversity there, and then there's also the logical diversity around carriers, routing paths, data centre egress, etcetera. So having a mix of those two, it essentially starts with what's in the ground outside your building, and then we can go from there. The other component that we add on top of that is Layer 2 services. So we can provide a mixed carrier in the ground with a common service on top of that, which then has routed paths out to different data centres, for instance. Leanne Taylor: And that was a great project we did a number of years ago for a customer. I remember the conversation clearly on a call, saying, "You know, we're upgrading some firewalls and, oh God, now I've got to go from a one-gig link to a 10-gig link. There's six months of my life talking to my Telco that I'm not going to get back." And it was great that you jumped in on that conversation and you actually had that stood up within two weeks. Now, that customer looked at me and said, "I've been in IT a long time, and I've never seen that happen." So, go into a bit of detail about that particular engagement and how you go about providing this amazing service that people don't know exists, I guess. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so this was during COVID, so the bandwidth requirements suddenly were tenfold higher, and the current capacity wasn't going to cope. And then also business continuity—that's where the diversity sort of comes in. What if that link fails? We're offline. So, just back to our same processes and structures, we just go through service qualification. What do you need? What sort of capacity? What type of service? Do you need a point-to-point, dark fibre, or just straight internet? We just work through our—it's almost like a checklist of what they want—and then we go to market and see what carriers are available that can do it, when they can do it, and how much it costs. Then we can present those different options back to the customer, and they can essentially choose what they want to do and how they want to weigh it up. "Yeah, we're happy to pay more to get it in tomorrow," or, "It's our secondary service that we're putting in, so it's less important. We can wait a few extra weeks or months to get the exact thing we want at the price we want." Part of that delivery is making sure the Telcos don't just flick an email out and leave it at that. You have someone that sits on your side of the table to chase them down and make sure they're delivering what they've said they're going to, and when. It's all well and good to place an order and then find out, "Oh, there are civil works that need to be done," which means council involvement, digging up streets, and six to eight-month lead times. Well, there might be a carrier that's already there that we can light up in six weeks. Leanne Taylor: And that's one of the great benefits, I guess, and the joys of what you do: you're giving the customer options. When they're dealing primarily with one Telco, the Telco is only giving them their options and not giving them the context of what the big picture looks like. So I really enjoy those conversations initially with you when you've done your site audits. We sit down with the customer and go through, as you said, here's the price and this is the timeline. And you're right, customers can then make an informed decision. "I need this link in quick; I'm prepared to pay for it," or, "It's not that urgent, and we can wait." But they've also got a breakdown of every carrier—or not every, but maybe four, five, or six different carriers depending on the scope—and actually have a clear understanding as to who's available, what capacity, and what price they are. And I think, particularly in this current state of the market where customers are being very frugal with their budget spends, it's really important to call out that your carriage is something you can save a lot of money on. So even if you're not due for a carriage renewal this year (it could be next year), it is still very much worth the conversation with Andy—which is a pre-sales conversation—to go through and actually understand your sites, what's available, and what your options are. You can take that spreadsheet of information and make some plans for next year, or raise a business case based on, "Hey, we're paying X, but I've got information here that says we can start saving $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 a month." Go and have a chat with the CFO in the business and go, "You know, what can we do?" It might just be something that you figure out at renewal time, or it might be Andy having a quick call to your carrier and seeing what he can renegotiate on your behalf. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so we don't just put the options in front of you and say, "Choose what you want." We'll run through them as to, "This option has this, they're pretty good. That option has that." And we also then go back to the carriers and say, "Hey, Carrier A over there is offering this at this price. Can you match that? Or can you get close to it?" Especially when you're talking around diversity. I've seen, for instance, one carrier is $2,000 and another carrier is $5,000. It's like, well, what's the difference? So, being able to go back to them and say, "Well, hang on, you're out unless you can get in cooee of the $2,000 carriage." The customer wants diversity, and we'd like to have you as one of those diverse paths. It's a headache that customers no longer have to deal with. We're essentially a filter between your business and the Telco, especially when it's not an area of expertise or something that you deal with every day. Every couple of years, you call them up and say... well, they probably call you and ask you to renew a contract without doing anything. Leanne Taylor: Yeah. So Andy, a lot of customers will have their primary carrier and say, "Oh, you know, I've got my backup as a wireless or 4G or what have you." Talk to me about that. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so that's great. It gives you cable diversity out in the street. If someone digs up the fibre, you've got a 4G wireless connection that's your backup service. The problem with that being the same carrier is that if they have an issue with their exchange or within their routing domain, that could potentially affect both their 4G and their fibre services. Then you're kind of left isolated. Leanne Taylor: You're still offline. Andy Suggars: Yeah, you're still offline. And I've had a customer that that has actually happened to. So, we moved their fibre network to a different carrier and retained the LTE network with the existing one. Now they have that diversity of cable and lead-in type, as well as the actual carriage service on top of that. Leanne Taylor: How often should you test your carriage failover? Andy Suggars: Ah, it's one of those questions. You've got a 4G SIM or a second fibre service and you never test it out. It could be that the service is working fine, but you've done a switch config or something on your side of the network that's going to hamper that failover process. So, doing regular failover checks is important, especially if you've got similar service types. If you've got two 1-gig services with different carriers, switch them over, run it for a day on the other service, and just make sure that one, it stays connected, and two, that performance is meeting expectations. Leanne Taylor: Because that's something that happens, I hear quite regularly—something's gone down but the failover didn't happen, or there was an issue and the backup didn't kick in, and that adds to an already stressful situation. Andy Suggars: Yeah, it's pretty common where it's a carrier-provided backup on top of their primary service. They have it in a router, and then there are timers that need to be counting down and matched, so you might be offline for five minutes, or the next hop is reachable, so it doesn't actually fail over. It becomes less of an issue where there's SD-WAN involved because it doesn't really look at the carrier perspective; it maintains two active paths. And providing that connectivity and that failover performance is a pretty critical part of the carriage side conversation as well. Leanne Taylor: So talk to me about your WAN Edge services. One of the great things I love about the customers we currently work on together is that if something happens in the network—whether it's carriage or something on the customer side—you kind of sit across both in some cases. So you're that single pane of glass, I guess, where you know what's happening before the customer does sometimes, and you can say, "No, I'm already on to that. That's a telco issue," or you're ringing them saying, "Hey, something's just dropped and you need to check your routers or switching." So, talk us through that. Andy Suggars: Yeah, in the corporate world, it's the "single throat to choke" sort of thing. Funnily enough, getting into carriage came off the back of our WAN Edge services—so, providing routers, SD-WAN, firewalls, all that kind of stuff to customers. I had one customer come and say, "Oh, we've got to redo our MPLS network. Is that something you can help us with?" And at the time, it was like, "No, I don't do that sort of stuff." And then seeing how that process played out for them and how bad it was, and the end state they ended up with, stuck for three years... That's where I looked into it, and I was like, "Okay, yeah, I can do this quite well." So now I'm providing the edge device that connects to the carrier network as well as the carriage on top of it. If a customer has a problem, they call us. And instead of us going onto our device and saying, "Oh, everything looks fine here, call your carrier," or the carrier saying, "I can see the network's up, it must be something on your side," we're across both of them. So we'll just look into both, look across whether it's the LAN side or the carrier side, and just assist you in getting it fixed, as opposed to saying, "This is not my problem, it's someone else's." Leanne Taylor: Yeah, and that finger-pointing happens far too often, I think. Andy Suggars: It takes so long to resolve because it's not anyone's problem. Until someone has proved that it's someone else, nothing really gets done. So rather than wasting time on those particular aspects of troubleshooting, we look at the whole service from your side right through to the Telco side. And we either engage the Telco, raise a support ticket with them, and chase that up, or we'll talk with the vendor of the WAN Edge services and raise a TAC case with them if it's potentially a bug, or if there's been a configuration change, then we assist in remediating that. Leanne Taylor: And that's not necessarily you offering that as a managed service. It's professional services and a collaboration with the customer as well, because often they want to keep control of their edge devices. There are a lot of MSPs out there, and that's where you do see some of that finger-pointing going on between the network team and the Telco. So, explain how that fits in if a customer is saying, "I want to keep control of my network." How would you fit into that scenario? Andy Suggars: Yeah, sure. We're essentially just a phone call for assistance, a "phone-a-friend" type thing. If you've got your own in-house guys that look after your firewalls and your networks, that's no issue at all. We don't expect to take over full management of it. We have a triage process and a troubleshooting process that we go through as resolvers, essentially. So if there's a problem that you need help with, and you're not getting any love from your carrier, or it might be an area of expertise that your guys just haven't seen before and are not across, then we can jump in and help. Or, we can do a managed service. Leanne Taylor: You can do both. Leanne Taylor: Excellent, Andy. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a lot of fun having you in the office, and I think the Telco diverse carriage conversation is one I love having. It can save customers a lot of money, and it keeps the Telcos—the big guys—honest as well. So, I think if you are planning or have your Telco renewal coming up this year or into next, it's definitely worth reaching out to Andy and having a chat. We'd love to have that conversation with you and see if we can find you some money back in your pocket. So, it's great, Andy. Thanks for coming in, and we'll see you next time. Andy Suggars: No worries. My pleasure. (Outro music with voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, and here at Taylormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades) /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/35822665

E5: Focus on Fastvue - Insights into Staff and Student Wellbeing 04/16/2025

E5: Focus on Fastvue - Insights into Staff and Student Wellbeing Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes—every time. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I’m joined by Scott Glew and Mark di Muzio as we dive into how Fastvue technology leverages firewall logs to provide powerful insights into user activity on the network. With a strong focus on wellbeing, this solution is especially valuable for schools, TAFEs, and universities, as well as organisations like local councils. We also uncover some unexpected use cases—real-world examples where Fastvue delivers meaningful insights that can lead to positive individual outcomes. For more details contact or visit Here is the refined text with Australian spelling: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everybody. I'm Leanne Taylor from Taylormade Sales, and today we have a great conversation for you about Fastvue. And today it's a pleasure to introduce Scott Glue and Mark Di Muzio to tell us all about Fastvue. What do you guys do, and why do my customers need to know you? Scott Glew: Thanks Leanne. Yeah, my name's Scott Glue and I'm the chief product officer and co-founder at Fastvue. Fastvue provides online safety monitoring and internet usage reporting for the world's leading firewalls. So, if you're using a Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, SonicWall, Cisco, those sorts of firewalls, then Fastvue will read in their log data and provide real-time alerts, reports, and dashboards that give you a clear visibility into what's happening online. Leanne Taylor: So what's some examples of some of the reporting that you can tailor from Fastvue? Scott Glew: Sure. So it's used super heavily in schools to detect students at risk of self-harm, suicide, extremism, radicalisation, which unfortunately we see every other day in schools. It's also used a lot by local councils and government organisations to ensure safety in places like public libraries. And a lot of corporate organisations also use Fastvue to help them with that horrible job that does come up from time to time of conducting employee investigations when they're required because no one likes doing that, but when you have to do it, you want it to be really easy and you want that report to be super accurate as well. So, just trying to provide the world's best reporting for the world's leading firewalls. Leanne Taylor: And really a customer can tailor that reporting to suit what they need, right? So let's just touch on on schools and education, because that's quite a hot topic at the moment for around student well-being. And I'm sure there's a lot of people listening going, what, really? You know, suicide and you know, what have you? Can you give us some examples of how you do that and why that's important in schools? Mark Di Muzio: Hi Leanne. Yeah, that is a good question on how we can actually help schools around those sorts of topics of suicide or extremism and why a solution like ours is very important. Having been in the industry for over a decade working with schools with different solutions, what I've been able to sort of see with Fastvue is as much as data is important, the accuracy of data is even more important. So what we're able to do with Fastvue is actually take out a lot of the white noise. So when we're reporting or alerting, it is as accurate as possible that we make sure that we talk to the right student in the right way about the right thing. Mark Di Muzio: So, examples of that would be that if you've got a student that was to go to an afl.com site to have a look at where their team was on the ladder, you can find that they have embedded sites like Sportsbet 365. So other solutions might say that a student has actually gone to a gambling site, but what we're able to actually do is show that they actually went to the AFL site, but the gambling site was also there, which means you never have to talk to that student about going to a gambling site. You know that they never went there, so that awkward conversation or accusing a student of doing something they didn't do doesn't have to happen. And that way you avoid actually turning a good student into a bad student or having to have a confrontational event with the parents of that student when they're obviously have done nothing wrong. Leanne Taylor: It's an interesting one for schools because obviously when students log on to the school network, it can be really difficult to get visibility as to what the kids are actually doing on the network, right? So you think they're in English, but they're in the back of the class on their laptop searching crazy cat videos or something on YouTube. And I know a lot of schools have tried to tackle that through closing down and whitelisting on their firewall and things like that. But with, you know, my daughter's doing VisCom at the moment for year 12, and they do have to go on and search certain things through YouTube or or what have you. So that becomes problematic for that classroom teacher that then has to go to IT and say, can you allow this website or application because we're using it as part of our learning. So tap on how all that comes together with you guys. Scott Glew: Yeah, great question. It's something that schools are constantly battling with, you know, the boundary between what do we allow and what do we block. Certainly for lower school, like year sevens and eights and and primary schools, you've got a different set of concerns to upper schools in in year 11 and 12. You definitely want to provide a more open internet. So what we try and advocate for is keeping an eye on what's happening online so that you don't have to block as much. You know, it's really easy just to say let's block YouTube because we've got some kids that are wasting time watching cat videos and streaming games and and whatever it might be from from YouTube. But you can keep an eye on it, you can actually get alerts when when that's being abused so that the IT team and the coordination with teachers doesn't have to be a big pain. We can just say, well, let's let's allow it and let's keep an eye on what's happening. Leanne Taylor: What I like about Fastvue is it often all these solutions with the IT team, and it's technology that they need to to implement. So there is an element of IT involvement to to install the solution, but it's really a business solution, isn't it? So explain how that works with the reporting to the principal, to wellness, to all different levels. Mark Di Muzio: Well, absolutely, Leanne. I'm happy to to answer that. So, I suppose Fastvue basically has a component within its solution for every level of a school from that point of view. A lot of principals are very interested in the data and we're able to supply bandwidth, who's using the bandwidth. Are they, have they got the right pipe size coming into the school to allow for what they need to do. And we can actually highlight whether they do need to increase their internet connectivity or whether there's something going on in the school that's actually limiting that internet connectivity or pipe that they could actually remove, thus saving the cost of having to buy a larger connection into the school as well. Mark Di Muzio: We find that student guidance officers like our solution because of the accuracy that we look at productivity for students. So, are they spending time going to Netflix when they should be in class? And therefore they can have a conversation with those students about not watching cat videos or basketball videos during their chemistry class, and therefore they can increase productivity. In fact, recently we had a school that put our solution on and they sort of said within two weeks of our solution being in place, they saw an increase of productivity within the school because they were able to detect those students that were spending time on sites that were not productive and they were able to have those conversations. Mark Di Muzio: From a well-being perspective, because we have the real-time alerts, if a student does something of a risky nature or inappropriate nature, then they will get that in a real-time alert or a daily, weekly, or monthly report that they can follow up with that student and make sure that they can have the right conversation with them. Mark Di Muzio: And then for the IT manager within the school, we do have a lot of reporting on the firewall as well. So they're able to get a lot of reporting from the firewall that firewalls generally can't supply that well. And that means that they can actually answer a lot of questions. I'll hand over to Scott to develop a little bit more around that. Scott Glew: Yeah, I was just going to add to that on the technical side. So, as you say, Leanne, it is a technical solution. It's the firewall at the end of the day where this data is coming from. And, so one example we had was the IT person realised that the kids were watching Netflix at 3:00 in the morning. This was a boarding school, so they had kids in their boarding house and they they had a rule that would turn on or turn off at 10:30 p.m. to stop kids from accessing Netflix and YouTube and sort of hope that they go to bed and get a good night's sleep ready for school the next day. And when they discovered that Netflix and YouTube were being accessed at 3:00 in the morning, they were able to drill down into that data and see the firewall rule that was actually allowing that traffic. And what they found is that at 10:30 p.m. all of the traffic started flowing down to the next rule, which was all visitors. So basically they had unfiltered internet access after 10:30 p.m., which was the exact opposite of what that rule was intended to do. So yeah, it wasn't just Netflix and YouTube going on after 10:30, there was a lot of other traffic as well, which was a bit of a concern. So, providing those reports back to the IT team to help them troubleshoot what's actually happening on their firewall and actually adapt their policies in the most efficient and effective way is also a key benefit of of using Fastvue. Leanne Taylor: Before we move on to the other verticals, I wouldn't mind you touching on, you know, back on the well-being topic, because obviously bullying and unfortunately suicide is a thing within our education system and with our young people. So have you got some examples of of how you've been able to alert to this and mitigate perhaps save a life based on your reporting? Mark Di Muzio: I suppose Leanne, one thing about our solution is it's 100% private. So we don't actually see any of the reports or the alerts that occur. When we have examples, it's if a school is prepared to discuss those with us. And we can appreciate that a lot of schools like to keep that within their school system. But we had recently a a school where an alert did come through about a student and they were able to pull that student out of class and have a discussion. They were then able to inform the parents. The parents actually came and took that uh student away and the parents were very happy with the way the school had dealt with it and the way that the solution had highlighted the incident that was occurring. For some schools, we do hear that. We don't push them for examples, but we do know that it's working. I think Scott might have a little bit more information on that, so I'll hand over to Scott. Scott Glew: Yeah, I was just speaking to a school the other day and was looking over what some of their reports and alerts, and one of them that was quite concerning was a student searching for "fun ways to commit suicide." So not just committing suicide, but fun ways to do it. And in the same time, I think it was the next day was searches from that same student about where to hide a bomb at school. So now we're talking about not just an individual situation, but actually being quite a large incident that could affect a lot more students and parents and and the community. So that was definitely uh a concerning incident that we saw just recently. Leanne Taylor: So let's pivot across to the other industries that you mentioned around councils and libraries and also in the corporate space. Have you got some examples of how those industries are using your solution? Scott Glew: Yeah, absolutely. So, um we do a lot of business in the UK and the US as well. So this one that comes to mind is a UK council. So they've got a public library, they've also got a prison in it's quite a large local council. And they've got the issue where say sex offenders may get released from prison. And as part of their parole, they're not allowed to have a computer at home. So they go to the public library to search for jobs and things like that. And then the police come along and say, "Hey, local council, can you please run a report on what was happening on that library computer?" And unfortunately, we have found people reoffending. We have actually our reports have been used in court cases to help convict murderers. So there was a couple that were plotting to do a murder in a public library because they didn't want to do the research at home because they thought they might be monitored or or found or traced back to their home address. So they went to the library to uh to do this research and that was uh quite incriminating evidence. Scott Glew: And we've also helped find a kidnapped child, a father sort of it was a custody concern and kidnapped his son out of school and the police knew that he went to the library the day before or something. So we got a report on that and saw that he'd actually booked some campground sites. So the police went to the campground and found the father and son there. So it's been used in some pretty heavy duty situations in in local councils. Scott Glew: But in the corporate space, yeah, it's usually from that point of view of doing a employee investigation when required or just sending scheduled reports out to HR and managers so that they can manage their employees more effectively. Because I'm sure everyone's had that situation of, I've got an employee, they're not quite hitting their numbers or I just need to know that, I sort of walk past their screen and I see all the windows suddenly minimise and all of those things. So I just want to get enough information to know what's happening. Because that's that is really the key when you're having those awkward discussions with employees is that you need evidence. It's really easy for an employee just to say, "No, I wasn't doing that, you know?" and it gets quite confrontational. But to be able to just lay out that evidence and say, "Well, this is what was going on," it can really help change that conversation. Leanne Taylor: And I'm assuming that works in the hybrid workplace as well. Does the user need to be on the corporate network or if someone is working from home, does that still apply? Scott Glew: Yeah, absolutely. So as long as you are going through the firewall is basically what it comes down to. So a lot of these firewalls have some kind of endpoint or VPN back into the firewall, however that wants to work. We've got a range of solutions these days, SASE and clients. As long as the firewall is aware of that activity, then we can report on it. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic, guys. And one last thing talking, obviously most customers go, "This sounds great. How much does it cost?" One of the things I love about working with you is that it's not an expensive solution to install for a customer. So can you maybe talk around your pricing bundles and how that works? Mark Di Muzio: Look, happy to do that for you, Leanne. It's a very economical solution. You know, the firewall is the principal component and then we actually pull that information from the firewall and mix it with our own little bit of magic to make everything happen. So we generally do it based on seats. A corporate environment to an education environment. We do have special pricing for education, which is cheaper than corporate because we understand that education doesn't always have the same sort of funding as a corporate environment might have. So we generally look at it based on the number of seats within that environment. So it could be up to a 50 seat for a a small business, or we start schools usually we start at uh 500 and under and work our way up in 500 increments from that. So 1 to 500, 501 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,500, and so on and so on for schools. But businesses we do start at a lot lower number to allow for that. We have dealt with schools which were quite rural and maybe only had three or four students, and we're able to come up with special pricing. Because from Fastvue's uh perspective, the most important thing is the well-being of the students within a school environment. So we're happy to have a look at that pricing to make sure that we can do the best that we can to help the students of that school. Leanne Taylor: And so is it a proof of concept or a demo? How can people engage with you? Mark Di Muzio: Fastvue always offers a 14-day free trial for a proof of concept within your environment. But if you actually go to fastvue.co/tms and download it from there, we'll extend that trial to 30 days for our uh Taylormade Sales clients that are interested in the solution as a bonus for listening to this podcast. The solution just needs to be downloaded into either VMware, Hyper-V, or Docker, or even private cloud. So it should only take five or 10 minutes to set up if you already have that environment in place. Leanne Taylor: Well, thank you guys. It's always great to chat to you about Fastvue. It's a great solution and it's a great conversation I love having with our customers. So thank you very much for coming into the studio today and I look forward to more conversations with you. Scott Glew: No problem. Thanks very much, Leanne. Thanks for having us. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/35822645

E4: Cyber Insurance with MyEmpire & PSC Insurance 03/14/2025

E4: Cyber Insurance with MyEmpire & PSC Insurance Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I'm excited to bring you a great discussion about Cyber Insurance. Joining me are the experts, Gareth Downie from PSC Insurance and Chris Self from MyEmpire Group to make it all clear for you. We break down why cyber insurance is essential to protect your business from cyber attacks and financial losses. Gareth explains the different types of coverage, and Chris shares practical tips on how to strengthen your security. We also cover what insurers look for, so you know what you need to get covered. It's all about keeping your business safe and informed. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: (Upbeat introductory music plays) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades out) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales and we've got a great session today. We're talking about cyber insurance. Today I have Gareth Downie from PSC insurance as well as Chris Self from My Empire Group. Welcome gentlemen. Gareth Downie: Thanks. Thanks for having us. Leanne Taylor: Gareth, starting off with you, tell us a little bit about PSC and really, what is cyber insurance? Why is it important and why do my customers need it? Gareth Downie: Thanks, Leanne. So a bit about PSC Insurance Brokers is we're the largest, um, independently owned insurance broker here in Australia. Um, and we're actually a, you know, major part of the Adona Group, which is one of the globally largest and independent insurance brokers. Um, and what that does, it actually allows us a lot of leverage, uh, for our clients, you know, when we approach international markets, we're able to get better rates, better premiums, and better coverage. And, and that ultimately just benefits our clients in the long run. When we turn our attention to cyber insurance, cyber insurance generally is a type of insurance that businesses take out to mitigate the operational and financial risk of a cyber event. Generally, we see coverage take two paths. You got what we call first-party and third-party coverage. First-party coverage is essentially when your business is attacked by a data breach or a ransomware attack, the policy will respond. Third-party coverage is when you become legally liable in your course of business for a network breach or a data breach or ransomware attack to a third party. Um, and that's kind of what we see a lot of policies take the form of. Leanne Taylor: Okay, so Gareth, why is cyber insurance so important? Gareth Downie: Why is it important, right? And this is, you know, something that a lot of clients ask us, you know, why must I buy, um, cyber insurance? Why is it important? I don't really need it. Um, and look, you know, that, those are valid questions, but, you know, cyber insurance is more important today than it's ever been because what we're starting to see is, you know, any threats, uh, are constantly evolving and there's actually no business large or small that's immune, unfortunately. So, and then a cyber event can, you know, have a devastating financial and reputational consequences for a business. I mean, you've got to think, you know, if you've built your business up from the ground up and then all of a sudden, um, you suffer a, a data or ransomware attack, you know, it could almost cripple your business. And by having cyber insurance, what it does is it provides the business with the financial protection, um, and access to expert, uh, response teams. So when you actually have one of these events, um, we've got an expert panel part of the insurance, um, that will help you and walk you through these, uh, events. And, you know, another real important thing that people sometimes misunderstand is, oh, well, I've got cyber insurance, I don't need to do active risk management. Um, and, and you know, that's a real kind of concern because, you know, buying cyber insurance is just good risk management. Um, it's also really handy to continue, uh, with, you know, your own cybersecurity and having strong cybersecurity practices. And this is, you know, what we've worked with clients and My Empire, um, who have been a great supporter of our clients in, you know, actually helping them develop good security hygiene, because, you know, cyber insurance is, is part of the broader risk management strategy, and it helps businesses recover, but the best approach when we talk cyber, cyber insurance and cyber, uh, security is, you know, preventing attacks where possible and being prepared to respond to events or cyber attacks when they occur. Leanne Taylor: So this is a great introduction to you, Chris. Um, can you tell us a little bit about My Empire Group and what you guys are seeing from the customer-facing side, and how you guys support them, um, complementing what Gareth is saying from the risk management strategy around cyber insurance? What are you guys doing in the day-to-day network operations for customers? Chris Self: My Empire is a, essentially a cybersecurity consultancy like many others. The, the key thing for us is we're here to help prevent that business ending. The way My Empire started was actually a two owners, they actually owned a previous business and was significantly impacted by a cyber attack, so much so that within two weeks of this attack unfolding, they lost their entire business. One key learning from that besides all of the instant response, helping to manage your people through a crisis like that was being really clear on what your info, cybersecurity or insurance policy really looks like. The concepts that Gareth touched on is exactly the same as what we're looking at when we look at third-party risk in security as well. So that first party, looking internal, how do we get the basics right? How do we build the baseline internally so that we're secure, we've protected ourselves, protected the things that matter to us. And then when we look at that third-party piece, what we're looking at there is the comfort we have of our supply chain and making sure that our supply chain appropriately aligns to our risk posture and providing that comfort through assessments, review of our suppliers so that they appropriately handle our data and report to us if anything goes wrong. That encompasses a variety of services as you would typically see across cybersecurity consulting, focusing on how do we strategise, how do we build our capability within inside the business, how do we look at risk, how do we look at technical controls, process controls, how do we build out a changing culture and awareness inside the business to support that business operating securely? And all of our conversations we have with our clients focuses so heavily on the business and their risk posture because from that, we can build out exactly what you need in regards to the types of controls, the level of depth that you take your implementation of your security capabilities across your organisation so that it is fit for purpose within inside a tolerable, uh, budget within inside the capability of inside your organisation as well. Leanne Taylor: So Chris, an interesting point you raised there because a lot of companies that I speak to go, "Oh, I've got an IT provider or I've got an MSP that looks after my IT." So as a business owner, I think there's a lot of thought out there that, oh, because I've got an IT company working with me, I don't need to worry about it. They're, they're doing all of that kind of thing. And I think it's really important to call out to our listeners that, um, yes, you've got your an IT provider generally looking after your networking and your Wi-Fi and your laptop rollouts and all all the sort of business as usual kind of activities, but it's really important to keep your cybersecurity, um, teams independent and separate to your IT operations teams. Chris Self: What I'd like to start with a little bit there, Leanne, is I think we have to look at this a little more of a another security term, so sorry to throw these in there, but a layered defence approach. And and focus on everybody has a specific role to play in that layered defence and for the betterment of that client and their environment and their protection of their data or protection more broadly of the things that matter to them. So, I think it's good to call out that there is a different role for the MSP, for a security provider, for the insurer, for your legal team. I think those there are all different types of roles that need to be considered to consider how we look at this layered defence for an organisation. Working with the MSP is where you you blend that operational element and I think having the conversations with your MSP around what is the right technology, what is the right process to support a secure environment is, is really important as well. Using a MSP, an MSP, using a security company like My Empire to support your overall security posture, uh, brings cohesiveness into the delivery of robust security controls. Leanne Taylor: Gareth, I might look back to you, um, just conscious of our time. So how do insurers view and assess our customers? Gareth Downie: Yeah, no, like a good question. So essentially, you know, if you, um, have never held cyber insurance before and you know, you operate a business, you know, insurers are looking for a couple of, you know, key things, you know, as a minimum. And we're talking, you know, MFA, so multifactor authentication, uh, we're looking for, you know, patching, do you have an antivirus? Um, do you know who has access to information? So asset management and user management. Um, you know, things like endpoint detection, uh, you know, those are the kind of basic things that an insurer is looking for, you know, in order to, you know, provide some sort of policy. I mean, long gone are the days where, you know, you could, um, go to an insurer and say, "Oh, my client has pretty much nothing, can you provide us a policy?" Nowadays, insurers are really looking for those minimum standards. But in terms of, you know, the affordability of cyber, there is a number of insurers on the market that, you know, offer a range of products from, you know, your bare basics to, you know, quite in-depth, uh, sub-limits and, you know, large limits and, you know, particularly on a couple of, you know, larger clients I deal with, we've got what we call towers, which you got multiple insurers on. Um, so the whole, you know, insurance industry around cyber is really developing and we're really looking to kind of grow, um, that kind of establishment, uh, for a lot of our clients that, you know, get better rates, um, through PSC's buying power, uh, globally as part of the Adona Group. So that's one thing that's been, you know, quite favourable for us moving forward. Leanne Taylor: Thanks, guys. This has been a great chat and hopefully has answered a few questions our customers have around the importance and benefits of cyber insurance as well as working with a trusted security partner to, to help guide them through that process. So thank you very much gentlemen for coming in today, and, uh, look forward to chatting with you next time. See you soon. Gareth Downie: Thanks very much. Chris Self: Thanks, Leanne. (Outro music plays) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades out) /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/35682880

E3: Managed Security with Arctic Wolf 01/16/2025

E3: Managed Security with Arctic Wolf Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Kenny King from Arctic Wolf — empowering customers of virtually any size to feel confident in their security posture, readiness, and long-term resilience. Arctic Wolf’s unique approach helps customers mitigate risk with their powerful solutions, while transferring any remaining risk through warranty and insurability options. We discuss the four pillars of the Arctic Wolf platform and how customers can select the security features best suited to their business. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-Minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor from Taylor Made Sales, and thank you for joining our 10-minute tech talk. And I'm super excited today uh, to have Arctic Wolf joining us. And I've got the wonderful, amazing Kenny King with me to talk all things managed security services. Kenny King: Cool. Thanks for having me, Leanne. We really appreciate the time to chat to you today. Leanne Taylor: Wonderful. Thank you. So, my question to all all my partners on the the podcast is, who are you? What do you do? And why do my customers need to know you? Kenny King: Yeah, cool. Well, uh, so who am I? Well, I'm I'm Kenny King. You know, I work here at Arctic Wolf. Uh, you know, I've been here for about a year, um, and uh, you know, I've worked in cybersecurity for about six years, uh, here in ANZ and uh, you know, who who are we? Uh, you know, Arctic Wolf, we help organisations essentially mitigate risk, uh, and with their current tools that they put into place up to date, you know, it's only can go so far to prevent from bad actors from passing through. And uh, we understand the potential impacts and attacks and intrusions that can become, you know, costly to the organisation or even so reputation. Leanne Taylor: Absolutely. Now, security is obviously top of mind for many customers at the moment. It has been for a number of years now, but what I absolutely love about what Arctic Wolf is bringing to the table is, you know, a lot of solutions, you know, the customer still needs to manage dashboards, and they get all these alerts and false positives, and it can be quite cumbersome to the point that they actually stop looking at it because uh, it's too overwhelming. And also not knowing, you know, what some of these alerts mean. So, what I absolutely love about what you guys bring to the table is it's a fully outsourced managed offering and you guys do all the heavy lifting. So, tell me a bit about that. Kenny King: so what we're doing is giving broad visibility in that scale. Uh, what we're able to do is since our flexibility with our platform, we give them anything from broad visibility to their end points, their network, their cloud, other apps, anything that they're currently shifting through, especially their email, right? Just lean teams out there and it's making it impossible for them to even so look at and triage everything on their own. At Arctic Wolf, we're we're taking in all that data through our Aurora platform and making sure that we can assist them in a way through our concierge team. Leanne Taylor: Now, I absolutely love this because you're not a set and forget kind of solution. You guys really work quite closely with the customer. So, you're really an an extension of their team. So, a lot of customers are out there going, I can't afford a full-time security person, and, you know, budgets are being cut left, right and centre. So, explain to me how you actually work with the customer what that looks like. Kenny King: Yeah, so we'll create a road map with the customer as soon as they come on board. So, our concierge team will be able to sit with them, look at their current environment, and make sure we create that plan and outcome for the organisation to become more proactive. We we noticed a lot of the shift is is that everybody's becoming more reactive to what happens into their environment, but they're not being proactive. Leanne Taylor: So you've mentioned the concierge team, um, I absolutely love it. Um, and I know somebody in marketing is high-fiving themselves for that that phrase, but explain who these people are and what do they do? Kenny King: Yeah, so you get a named a concierge person who will be able to work with you one-on-one uh, depending on what solution you you've choose and when you come on board, there's a onboarding process. And what they're doing is is they're creating that security journey for you. I call call it kind of like pick your own journey. What what are you guys focusing on? Are you looking at Essential Eight? You looking at NIST? Uh are you looking to benchmark your endpoints to be able to look into more of your end users? Are you not monitoring your cloud, your firewall? What we're trying to do is make sure that type of journey aligns with the business objectives to provide them the best outcome within the organisation as well. Leanne Taylor: So customers get a person, a real life person. There's no AI. It's a it's a monthly meeting with a human uh to actually hold your hand and walk through each month and keep the customer accountable, I guess as well, which is what I like is that you have these regular catch-ups with the team and you can you can sort of talk and delve into all things that are happening within that month or things to look out for. So I think that's amazing. So, you talked about joining the platform. So, I know you've got four different pillars. Can you break those down and explain how that works and and what they all do? Kenny King: We we have four different solutions that can help uh, an organisation. So, our first one would be our managed detection and response. Uh that's looking and monitoring the customer's environment on a 24/7 basis. Uh, and and this is the key platform that we've had. This is the one that we've created uh, within the past actually it's 13 years ago now. Um, and and making sure that we're looking through the dark web and and understanding the customer uh and environment on a broader scale. Uh, the other one would be our managed risk. That managed risk is looking for any internal and external vulnerabilities, making sure anything that's passing through, uh we can analyse it and making sure it's triaged as well. Leanne Taylor: So, I like that because a lot of customers have invested in vulnerability tools, and there's quite a few vendors out there that are specific, I guess to solving that particular problem. So, you customers can actually have your MDR but also have the vulnerability as well, or vice versa, replace their existing vulnerability solution with Arctic Wolf with a view to grow further into the platform if they wish, yeah. Kenny King: Yeah, absolutely. And uh what we're trying to see is do you want to pick and pull between what you have, or do you want to consolidate? A lot of customers that come on see us as a consolidation platform to make sure that they're not wearing multiple hats because they can't hire somebody. They have a level one. um, and especially with the limited talent, you know, that we're seeing across uh, you know, ANZ, they see us as that one-stop shop. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. And what's the next pillar? Kenny King: Yeah, so the other one would be the manage security awareness training. Leanne Taylor: Oh, I love this one. Kenny King: Yeah, well, me too. Uh just a heads up, they all sound like myself. It's all actors. I am not an actor myself. Uh but uh with the name specifically, but uh, you know, they they keep up to speed with technology, changes and and everything that's happening. We roll it out. Everything is there for you. Leanne Taylor: Talk me through what that looks like cuz obviously BAU for a customer, they have to pull the user group together, they've got to create the email. So is that part of the concierge? They they do that each month or you can have a program throughout the year of who you want to target when and what kind of email that's going to be? Kenny King: Yeah, so uh it's pretty much already created. And what we do is we have the manage bit that's part of if they would like to work with that and make sure we want to roll out the strategic way of making sure our employees are prone to human error and our human defence shield, and if that's the focus, we can roll out the awareness training program. And there's, I always put it this way, there's two different types of like Kenny's out there. You know, you got work Kenny who's always making sure and reviewing emails and and looking at it, or there's, you know, Kenny outside of work and and I got and I'm just going, oh, that's that looks important. I'll click on it, you know, but now it's like, you know, with these types of modules and they're bite size. They're not 45 minutes what we're used to. It's it's two minutes max and you you look at it and you go, oh wow, okay, that resonated pretty well. Leanne Taylor: Yeah. Awesome, I love it. And what's your final pillar? Kenny King: Our our final one is incident response. So, it's a retainer plan that we put into place, making sure that uh it works with the customer, making sure that, you know, they're prepared in case of the inevitable happens, our concierge team will be able to work with them and making sure that they're using that as a plan and can instead of waiting, so they get an SLA that's available to them. We'll work with them and making sure that we understand that their environment is there, you know, instead of going through somebody else and then they have to wait days for someone to review. That incident response plan's in place, created by us to work with them. So in case of the inevitable happens, we can help triage from there. Leanne Taylor: So, part of that, do you guys work with the customer to create the incident response playbooks? Kenny King: Yes. Leanne Taylor: Because that can be very different. you know, a council to a school, to a a retailer all have different playbooks. So, can you talk me through that? Kenny King: Yeah, so depending on the industry and vertical, what we'll do is we'll sit down with the customer and and that falls in with the uh security journey as well too. So it's if that's a main focus and they don't have an incident response plan in a place, and they said that's a part of what we want to present, the board wants to make sure that we're covered so that they don't get hit. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So, altogether, the four pillars in an Arctic Wolf solution and everyone, you know, the elephant in the room is always, how much does this cost me? So, can you sort of touch on your pricing and how that works? Kenny King: Yeah, yeah, so we mainly focus on the user and server uh count that's in there. Uh and then also break it down based off of their environment. So it can be, you know, how many data centres do you have? Uh what kind of SaaS platforms are you using? Um, and then also, is there a limited users as well? Uh and then from there we go, okay, well what resonated with you the most, right? So those types of platforms that we have the four pillars from managed detection and response, managed risk to managed security awareness training and incident response, depending on what they choose, we we can work with them and create a bundle for them. Leanne Taylor: Great. And I understand that that can be bolted on, I guess over time. So if they just want to choose one solution for now and in six months time sort of expand the platform, that's okay as well. Kenny King: Yeah, absolutely. So uh you'll be working with a customer success person along the way and also they'll say, hey, you know, you guys are maturing in this this side, we can be able to give them feedback and understand like, hey, do you want to uh upgrade and add on something else? Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. This has been amazing. I absolutely am looking forward to working with you guys this year and I know Arctic Wolf is making a big splash in the market with a bunch of customers at the moment. So, if you are interested in knowing more or uh heckling Kenny for a lunch, a corporate lunch or dinner, he's your man. So uh reach out to us and we'd love to have a chat and also maybe do a demo for you so you can see all the techy stuff and how it works under the hood. So, thank you so much for coming in today, Kenny. It's awesome to have you in the studio and uh thank you for your time. Kenny King: Of course, thanks Leanne. Appreciate your time today too. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/34877820

E2: Going to Market with D2 & Associates 12/10/2024

E2: Going to Market with D2 & Associates Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by David Collins from D2 & Associates —a boutique consultancy firm helping businesses go to market effectively and efficiently through Expressions of Interest (EOI) or Request for Quote (RFQ) to ensure their technology meets the desired business outcomes. With the ever increasing products and services suppliers, it's important to work with the right technology and partner who can support and delivery technology outcomes for your business. We’ll discuss how working with an expert in 'going to market' can set you up for success and save you valuable time and money whilst ensuring you partner with the right service providers to support your business's needs. Stay tuned as we dive into how to go to market effectively. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales and today's Tech Talk, I'm really excited to have David Collins from D2 and Associates talking about going to market. David Collins: Thanks Leanne, good to be here. Leanne Taylor: Thank you. So, who are you? What do you do? And why do customers need to know you? David Collins: I am uh someone who's worked in the uh IT outsourcing industry for, gee, 30 years. Um in a variety of roles, delivery, um sales, uh client management. And now I'm um independently looking to uh help organisations with their sourcing requirements and how to go to market and how to pick the right suppliers. Leanne Taylor: Great. So tell us a bit about D2 and Associates. So what do you guys, how do you do that? David Collins: D2 and Associates is, I could be best described I guess as a as a boutique consulting organisation. Um we're a team that have some similar history in terms of employers and experience. Um and our services range anything from uh IT strategy development for uh IT services suppliers through to helping individual organisations with their sourcing requirements as we're talking about today. Um looking at uh existing contracts that might need some help or some support uh to get them back into a good shape. Um a range of services, anything to do with IT services from either a managed services or a strategy um consulting aspect. Leanne Taylor: Excellent. So I know being on the receiving end of many years of responding to tenders, what the customer is looking for and how they articulate that and then what actually comes out in an RFP or an expression of interest document can sometimes get lost in translation or there's not enough info and there's a whole lot of backwards and forwards with questions and things like that. Can you maybe touch on how you guys can support customers in making sure that they go out to market correctly and and what does that process look like for you guys? David Collins: Sure. Okay. Um let me start with sort of breaking it down into five main areas and then I'll focus in on a couple in answer to your question. So the broad set of steps when you're taking something to market, uh and perhaps the most important is the first one, which is around being clear on the business requirements. So developing a business requirements document that gets agreement from the uh internal stakeholders uh on on all the details of what's required. Um then the next step, if uh it's not clear as to who the the set of suppliers could be that could provide the service, going out through an expression of interest process and taking maybe 10, 15 suppliers and uh and coming down to maybe a short list of about five. Um next step then is the RFP process and issuing that and uh assessing that and then and shortlisting down to two, maybe three suppliers who you take through a negotiation process. And then you get to the preferred supplier and you take that through the um the final contract development and agreement development process and sign them off and off you go. So they're the sort of the high-level steps. But coming back to your particular question, um I think probably the most important thing is to get on in in terms of getting off on the right start and making sure that the requirements are well understood and and agreed um internally importantly before it goes out to the market is the development of a clear business requirements document and a business case. Um so the business requirements document is covers a range of different components but let me sort of rattle off a list of the things I normally look for. Um first off, what's the problem? What's the business problem that's being solved? Um is it is it to do with the cost of maintaining IT skills? Is it um the current solution is a service as provided aren't reliable or the quality of service is not good? Um is it easy or not easy to do business with the with your current supplier or your current arrangement? Or has there been a change of business structure that means that um perhaps you're combining with another company, you've got too many IT people and you decide you want to go to market and get someone else to provide it. Um or a range of issues. So being clear on what that the the the business problem is that's being solved. Um and talking about the different groups or business units that will receive the services. So being clear in the document about your different areas of business, they may have different service requirements, different service level requirements. Um they may have times in the year that have are particularly critical to them, so they need enhanced levels of service. Some information on the on the size and scale and components of the environment to be managed. Um could be infrastructure devices, could be up through applications, but being very clear on that. Um who the other suppliers of services are. So there may be some internal uh suppliers of service, there may be some existing external suppliers that aren't subject to the re- to the uh new engagement that you want to put out on the market and you want them to stay. So a supplier needs to be clear on that. What are you looking for from the supplier? What are the types of services? What are the types of services you decide you want to keep in house? Level one service desk is one of the ones that many organisations decide to keep in-house so that uh the team is very clear on what the requirements of the users are, rather than giving it to an external provider. Um an idea of who the potential suppliers are, how quickly the services need to be in place, and particularly for the internal business case, what's the budget? What what sort of uh what sort of money are you prepared to spend to make the um to make the business case work? Leanne Taylor: Understood. Now, there's also, I guess two ways to go to market, isn't there? There's an expression of interest and then there's an RFP process. Can you talk about those two and why you would do one or the other or both? David Collins: Really what the whole EOI aspect is is going out to potential suppliers and say, look this is what we're looking for, can you do this and are you interested in responding to an RFP? Because what you don't want to do is issue the RFP document, the detailed document out to say 15 organisations in the marketplace and then have to wade through all those responses and make all those decisions about getting down to a short list. Leanne Taylor: So, now that an RFP or an EOI goes out um to market, talk to me about how you guys add value to customers during that process because obviously there's a lot of responses that come back and the devil's in the detail. So how do you guys, what's your process around that? David Collins: Okay. So let me quickly talk about getting the RFP out the door. Um the, we, if we've done an EOI phase, we've got the content from that, we've got the content from the business requirements work. Um we then pull that together into an RFP document and covering things like the background, the business objectives, what's in scope, what's the process, um what are the uh the guidelines for completing the document, um the commercials, the evaluation criteria, all that sort of information, and that document gets released. We typically do a uh vendor presentation, a kickoff presentation with the vendor. So we would um facilitate that, we would set that up. We'd obviously get input from uh our client in terms of what's required uh and bring and they absolutely would want them to be part of that process. Um the document then goes out to the uh to the list of prospective respondents. In that four-week period, you typically get a number of uh questions coming back, and we encourage those questions to come back. So handling that whole Q&A process, be it a a phone call, more more often it's a formal written uh question and we turn around a formal written response and keep a track of all those. And you get to the point then where the RFP comes back, and then the assessment starts and we facilitate and coordinate their assessment, their objective assessment, and subjective if they want to get in and do the scoring as well, um on on each of the responses. Leanne Taylor: So David, what does an engagement look like uh for a customer to work with with you guys? David Collins: It it varies. It it can be as simple as, 'Here's an RFP document that they've already developed and they're about to release it out to the market and they just want someone to have a a review of it for a couple of days just to make sure it's uh it's hitting the mark, it's got all the required components.' Or it could be a comprehensive involvement starting at the business requirements, going all the way through the EOI, RFP, um negotiation phases, um implementation, and then some ongoing work after that. Leanne Taylor: That's fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. We're out of time. Um but I'm looking forward to more of these conversations with you and I know we've got some webinars planned early in the year to uh have customers jump on and actually have a Q&A session with you um and run through each of those steps in a bit more detail. So thank you so much David from D2 and Associates and I look forward to chatting with you soon. David Collins: Thanks, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/34358970

E1: Let's talk Back Ups with Druva 11/18/2024

E1: Let's talk Back Ups with Druva In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Farhan Hudda from Druva—a leading global SaaS backup solution. Druva is designed to help businesses secure and protect their data in the cloud, providing reliable, scalable, and hassle-free backup and recovery. With cyber incidents on the rise, having a solid backup solution is no longer optional—it’s essential. We’ll discuss how Druva safeguards your data, why a cloud-native approach is a game-changer, and how businesses can mitigate risks while maintaining productivity. Stay tuned as we dive into the tech that every business needs to stay resilient! Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I’m Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I’m passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or visit Full Episode Transcript: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 minute Tech talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here and I'm super excited today to be talking to you about all things backup with Druva. And we've got Farhan Hudda joining us today. Welcome Farhan Hudda. Farhan Hudda: Thanks Leanne. Thanks, thanks for having me on. Leanne Taylor: My pleasure. Now, talk to us about backups because there's obviously lots of things going on in that space and one thing that I absolutely love about working with you at Druva is that you guys are 100% cloud. So talk us through who you are and what you do and how you do it. Farhan Hudda: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I mean backup, backup and recovery, uh, is, uh, not a new, uh, tool in the, in the IT, uh, sort of vertical. It's been going on for about 30 years. Uh, I think predominantly the challenges, uh, that backup, uh, softwares were solving, uh, were mainly around availability risk, right? So hardware failure, application failure. Uh, more recently, uh, threats like, uh, user risks or compliance risks or more importantly ransomware, uh, you know, has been, uh, more and more the reason why backup tools are being used. And that's kind of where, um, we sort of set ourselves apart. We can certainly make sure, uh, that we can solve customers' availability risks around hardware and application failure, but where we really set ourselves apart is, uh, when the customer has to recover from a ransomware attack, uh, or a insider exploitation attack, uh, you know, Druva will be, uh, a very, very good tool. So I'll take a step back here as well. uh, and sort of cover uh what Druva is, probably a name, um, you know, many businesses and organisations in Australia have not been familiar with. Uh, but we are a backup and and recovery vendor. Uh we are 100%, um, you know, SAS. So uh, we are built in the cloud, we're built in AWS. Um, customers don't need to have any presence in AWS, uh, to be a customer with Druva. That's just our storage, uh, platform, uh, where the data will be stored. Um, and there's no ingress or egress charges that the customer will have to worry about when we pipe the data, uh, to the Druva cloud, uh, and back to the customer's, um, you know, uh, servers and and um, data centres when they're doing restores. Leanne Taylor: So, tell us about, you know, replacing a lot of customers out there have a lot of on-premise devices and a lot of on-premise solutions. Can you talk us through how they migrate off that or how you're your Druva can provide significant cost savings by having it all in the cloud? Farhan Hudda: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, you know, there's there's really three, um, pathways, uh, or three options the customer has, uh, when they're deciding, uh, to either keep their, uh, you know, backup vendor or look at something, uh, new and exciting. Uh, legacy traditional, uh, software, uh, vendors like Veeam and Commvault, uh, they're mainly on premise, uh, where you would have a storage platform, uh, and a licence that's provided by Commvault or Veeam. Uh, you know, the customer is responsible for making sure, uh, that they design it themselves or they are their service partner will design it for them. Uh, the cost of operations or the total cost of operations can be very, very high, uh, and the risk can be very, very high mainly because the customer is responsible for ongoing maintenance, capacity and performance management, you know, power, cooling, space, where you're keeping, uh, those backups, uh, the network that's required to run your backups, storage, uh, and your server or or virtual machine as well. Second option, uh is a traditional appliance. Uh someone like Cohesity uh or Rubrik uh might offer. Uh most of those challenges uh will sort of still stay the same. Uh the integrated appliance uh you know, you don't have to worry about storage or server but you still have to worry about ongoing maintenance. You know, so that's making sure you're patching everything on time, capacity and performance management again, network. Uh so those challenges will still persist. Uh, a solution like Druva where we're 100% cloud, uh, the customer does not have to worry about any infrastructure or maintenance. You know, we make sure that everything's patched and upgraded in the back end for the customer. Uh, and because we're a SAS solution, it's, it's a consumption based pricing model. So there's never going to be any, uh, concerns around overprovisioning or underprovisioning storage. We can sort of grow with the customer or as their requirements grow. Uh, we have committed, uh, you know, SLAs, so we deliver on those SLAs. Um, so essentially the the biggest thing that I think, uh, customers, uh, are noticing is that we're taking that risk away, right? Uh, the risk of, um, backups, uh, being targeting during a ransomware attack, which is very common practice, you know, that can never happen with Druva. Leanne Taylor: So, tell us about what sort of workloads can customers back up with you guys? Farhan Hudda: Yeah, great question. Um, so we will provide a single pane of glass. There won't be, you know, different or multiple logins that the customer has to uh, sort of log into, uh, to look at their Druva dashboard. We will be able to back up, uh, all of their SAS applications, Microsoft M365, uh, is probably the most common one, uh, that we see, you know, customers use for their email, SharePoint, One drive. Uh, Google Workspace, we can back that up as well. Uh, we can also backup Salesforce. Uh, and then anything else that the customer is running in the data centre, right? So, uh, things like VMware, Hyper-V, uh, any databases, uh, Oracle workloads, um, file servers, Linux servers, anything that you could expect, uh, to be found in a traditional data centre, uh, we can back those up as well. Uh, and where we're seeing, uh, the market move to now is, uh, you know, using platform as a service, uh, in the public cloud. So, you know, customers might have some VMs that they're running in Azure. A customer might have some, uh, EC2 instances that they're running in AWS. Regardless of where that workload is residing, whether it's on premise or whether it's in the cloud, uh, we will be able to back it up, uh, into Druva, like I said, without any ingress or egress costs. We can also back up, um, end points for customers as well. So things like, you know, laptops, tablets and mobile devices that are running either on Windows, uh, Mac or Linux. Although that's a dying market, we do see the importance of backing up endpoints for C-level executives and things of that nature. Leanne Taylor: That's awesome. Now, I know we've just recently done a POC for a customer. Can you very quickly sort of talk through what that looks like? Because it was super easy on the call that we had. Farhan Hudda: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, yeah, as, as, as we sort of, uh, noticed through the POC that we're running at the moment, we don't really have to ship out, uh, anything to start a POC. Uh, it's all, you know, uh, SAS. So, essentially what we have to do is just, uh, you know, set that POC tenancy up for the customer. Um, and we can actually start backing up their workloads, uh, within 15 minutes. So M365 is a good example, it's very, very easy to configure. Uh, we have a term that we use internally that we can actually get you guys configured and backed up in about 10 clicks for Microsoft 365. Uh, for, um, for this specific customer that we, that we mentioned earlier, you know, we're backing up their Hyper-V, uh, environment. Um, and, you know, that probably takes about half an hour to 45 minutes for us to configure. Uh, so it's, it is very simple. Uh, we can, um, you know, uh, set up a POC for a customer, really within 24 hours. Uh, and like I said, we don't have to ship anything, so we can be as, uh, we can be ready as fast as the customer, uh, can make some time. Leanne Taylor: Now, tell us about pricing. Everyone goes, wow, I love what I'm hearing, but how much is this going to cost me? So, how do you guys handle your pricing? Farhan Hudda: Yeah, another good question. Um, and you know, I could, I could be cheeky and answer that by saying how long is a piece of string. But, uh, But, but to give you, I guess a finger in the air, uh indication on cost. Uh for SAS applications, uh we licence that and we'll use M365 as an example, we licence that on a per active user basis. So we're only going to licence uh the active users uh that have an active mailbox in your M365 tenancy. Uh we can include shared and resource mailbox backups for free. We can also uh include preserved user uh backups for free. Um, from a data centre and cloud workload standpoint, um, you know, we, um, we have a credit system. So essentially one credit uh equals to one terabyte of data that we're moving to the cloud and the customer only pays for data that moves to the cloud uh after de duplication and compression. Uh, another thing uh that I should uh note here is um the way uh our backup works is we we will do a first full backup uh and then forever incremental after that. So generally the speed of the backup after the first backup is completed is is quite fast. Um so yeah, the like I said, the customer is paying per active user on M365 uh and for everything else which is uh you know, data centre cloud workloads, customers paying that on a per terabyte basis that moves to the cloud. But keep in mind that's after de duplication and compression and just as an example for VMware, uh, you know, on average a Druva customer is seeing about a three to one de duplication. That all depends on the type of data that we're backing up but it's quite common for us to get a, you know, three to one de duplication on VMware, HyperV, uh things uh virtualisation, um, like HyperV and VMware. Leanne Taylor: So, Farhan Hudda, tell me about Druva's retention policies, you know, what, how does that work with customers? Because obviously that can be quite varied across businesses. Farhan Hudda: Yeah, yeah, good question again. So, um the retention that the customer chooses to set is, you know, entirely up to them based on whatever compliance requirements they might have. You know, we've seen in the education space, um, some of those, um, student data that needs to be kept for about 49 years. Uh, if the student is indigenous, their data needs to be kept for 99 years for example. Uh so we, you know, Druva can support all those retention requirements. You can keep your data forever as well. Certainly there will be uh impact on um how much data you're going to be consuming in the cloud if your retention is going to be forever. But we can certainly support that. Uh and again, most customers might have a retention requirement for either three or five or seven years. Uh and again, uh the customer can easily choose those retention uh policies on the Druva console. Uh something that we're we'll be happy to show the customer uh during a live demonstration. Leanne Taylor: All right, well that's time up for today. That's our 10-minute tech talk with Druva. Thank you so much for your time today, Farhan Hudda. And if anyone would like to further the conversation with us, we'd love to have a chat with you and talk all things backup. Thanks again and see you next time. Leanne Taylor: Thanks for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected and we'll see you next time. /episode/index/show/4eab21db-573a-4d37-8bdc-90771f0120a8/id/33970062

Tech Talks with Taylor

TOPICS