Mentorship Matters: Lessons from a CTO with Performive’s Ryan DiRocco

Scott Kinka: 

Well, hi, and welcome to another episode of the Bridgecast. We’re thrilled to have Ryan DiRocco on with us. He has been the CTO of Performive for about 20 years. We’ll get into that in the discussion today. But Ryan, how are you today?

Ryan DiRocco:

Doing well, Scott. Thanks for having me here.

Scott Kinka:

Awesome. Where are we speaking from? Where are you?

Ryan DiRocco:

I am in Canton, Georgia, which is northwest Atlanta.

Scott Kinka: 

I’m not gonna do it now because I’m gonna ask you for a shameless prediction later, but everybody who listens to this thing knows that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Philly fan, and Atlanta had quite a day, but we’ll save that. So you’re there in the Atlanta area. Have you been there for your whole career?

Ryan DiRocco:

Professional career, predominantly, yeah. I’ve been here since 93. So quite some time.

Scott Kinka: 

Okay. All right. Through the two thousands. I mean, you’ve had two or three strange eras in tech in the time that you’ve been in Atlanta and probably at the time that you’ve been at Performive. We’ll get there as we go. You’re listed. Well, before I go here, let me just ask the Atlanta family to tell us a little bit about your background. What do you do on weekends? Just personalize it for us. Let us know who you are.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, so I’ve been in Atlanta since 93. I came here as a kid following my father, a tech and IT corporate warrior. So, I have been here ever since. College here in town, Georgia State University. I met my wife, let’s see, in August, so 20, 21 years. Married, four kids. Today, my oldest is 19, birthday is today. Two pet pigs. I know our team loves hearing the story about them. Pet pigs that live in the house they’re like dogs. Not food, they’re friends. So yeah, it’s kind of an interesting mix.

Scott Kinka: 

How did that happen? I’m sorry. You said the team likes hearing about it. Now, you’re going to open it all up to us. Is that something you’re willing to share? How does one end up with pigs?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Sure, one of my sons just loved pigs as a kid, played the Angry Birds video game, you know, all the apps in the games and loved pigs and the little green pigs, and then he decided that he wanted pet pigs. So we got these two pet pigs, Daisy and Dexter. They’re now four years old. They’re really stubborn dogs, and I love them.

Scott Kinka:

All right. Well, we might need a photo; not sure what they’ll ask about that. Anyway, your LinkedIn profile says that you’re a CTO and entrepreneur. It also says that you’ve been at Performive for 20 years. So you’re gonna have just to tell us how you got here. Walk that through for us.

Ryan DiRocco: 

I don’t think we have enough time to cover that. Yeah, so yeah, you mentioned twists and turns and iterations of tech through Atlanta. I started at an incredibly young age, way back when I started doing IT consulting when I was 13 years old. So I was here through the dot com era. That’s actually while I was in college, through the dot com boom and collapse through the Y2K.of make it short. Variations of time. As we ran into that, we had that big boom, that fall off, then the dot com boom, then the fall off. So it was an interesting journey. But through that, we learned from me and my business partners in the early days that at our core, at the heart of what we did, was customer service. It was always serviced. And that was kind of the founding element of the business. It was when we were all still young, in college days. Frankly, we were doing things on the side, just having a good time learning, getting access to tech, and providing these specialty services as the world was developing. These were cloud-managed services before the cloud was a thing and before infrastructure at scale was a thing. Everything was still on-prem or colo. It was a totally different world back then. So that was really kind of the genesis of the business that just sprung it forward. And, of course, over time, technologies mature, and platforms change. We go from you. Everything is physical to the advent of virtualization, hyperscalers, public cloud, and all these different variations. So yeah, I’ve been there along the way to see the journey and the changes.

Scott Kinka:

And that was, it says total server solutions. Is that the business that you started that ultimately became Performive?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, absolutely. There was actually, I did start a different business was which was called Wire Six at the time, which was focused solely on on infrastructure. So, unmanaged infrastructure. If we use the old words of the day back then, those were dedicated servers. You know, now it’s cloud bare metal. Same thing, different, different names and tech, right? Everything that’s old is new. So yeah, I launched that business, grew that to a rather sizable scale, and met the folks from Total Server Solutions, who were actually our neighbours in the data center. So, their servers were here in the data center. Mine were here. We were neighbours with a cage wall and a data center. And what we realized back then is that I had a core group that was great at infrastructure and technology, and they had a core group that was great at managed services. Combining those two things was a really solid play. More value for the customer, better infrastructure, better-managed services. So, we did a joint venture to build our first data center. So actually, we’re the largest tenants of a facility, but we said, know, hey, as part of this, the story of this, this rollup of tech and services that having our own facility and infrastructure at that point in time was very advantageous to our customers. So we built our first facility, merged the businesses together, and then continued to grow from there.

Navigating the Tech Landscape: Lessons Learned

Scott Kinka: 

How long ago was that?

Ryan DiRocco:

Gosh, you’re really making me use the time machine here. 

Scott Kinka: 

I’m super, super interested, I’m sorry.

Ryan DiRocco:

So yeah, yeah. So, as for the original foundation, I can tell you that the date is June 6th, 2004. When you start something, it’s kind of like a child is born. Now that child is mature and off to college, right? But you remember that birthday. So that was the foundation. And then, kind of through those early phases, we launched and built out that data center in 2008. 2011, we kind of merged all the entities that we had created together. And then, through that, it continued with a number of years of organic growth up until 2017, when we made our first major acquisition. We had made some small acquisitions along the way, but 2017 was pretty transformative in that we made a large acquisition that really brought additional skill sets, talent, and basic solutions into the business. I made a few more acquisitions through that up until, effectively, let’s call it the COVID period, which was unfortunate when that occurred. We were right in the middle of relaunching the brand or launching our new brand. Through that history of acquisitions, we had ended up with some, let’s say, mixed messaging from brand identity or maybe some identity crisis, know, a customer having an experience that maybe they came from, you I used to be ex-company customer, right? So we went into that rebrand to kind of right as COVID hit. So it was A very interesting and challenging time, I think, to launch a rebrand. But yeah, we launched the Performive name as that kind of consolidated name to bring all those brands and experiences together under one roof. And from basically 21 till present, Performive.

Scott Kinka: 

Gotcha. And I want to spend a little bit of time just having you give us the pitch, but one performs off because I’m sure that there are folks who are listening right now who maybe don’t know the brand well enough. As you said, you’ve been operating under it for a shorter period of time, but I want to just close out on you for a minute. You know, the story you just gave is the picture of an entrepreneur, but you are not a serial entrepreneur, right? I mean, it’s been in one chain. What’s the, help me out with this. Like what… What advice would you give that you wish you had something you wish you knew back then that you know now? This kind of advice for entrepreneurs.

Ryan DiRocco: 

I mean, honestly, I was having this conversation yesterday, and there is no substitute for experience. And I think that’s the most challenging thing. And the closest that you can get to, you know, having a substitute for experience is solid mentorship and having that leadership and that mentorship around you to seek those answers. You know, along the way, we made plenty of mistakes. You know, that’s part of growing and learning. But when you’re growing a business to a scale, you can very conceptually think about it. It’s a very stair-step model, right? And there’s something that’s working for the business at this scale. But once you take that next step up, that process or maybe that way of architecting a team or having the right people in the business, what you need here is not what you need here. And the interesting thing is that as you learn and you make those changes and you move, what you find is that what you had here that was right for the business that wasn’t right in the middle sometimes becomes right again at that next scale. That kind of learning to see exactly the same concept with technology is having the ability to have the experience to know and see where those next evolutions are. I think that’s invaluable.

Scott Kinka: 

What’s all this now? 

Ryan DiRocco:

This was the exact conversation I had yesterday. I was like, man, if I could go back 20 years with that knowledge that I now have of how to architect a team and a growth strategy and a product or what we’re doing, it’s game-changing. So, the best advice is to seek out mentorship and leadership that you can leverage.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Let’s jump to the performance story for a minute. So, you guys are an established business that’s 20 years old. You’ve got, you know, people that know the brand. You’ve got sellers out there talking about the brand, but you’re the guy, and you’re the CTO. You give us the story. What’s the performance story from your lens?

Ryan DiRocco:

I mean, that’s a lot of pressure because I think the sellers tell the story well, right? When you get the CTO, you’re going to get a little bit of a technical response, right? Yeah, there are fewer sales here. So, maybe the story is not as polished. But yeah, it is performative at its core. If you look at the marketing taglines, they are going to say something like, you know, the first. A multi-cloud VMware focus provider built for the mid-market. That’s a lot of marketing speak, right? 

Scott Kinka: 

That’s okay. Nerd us up. Let’s go.

Ryan DiRocco: 

You know, if we dig down into it from the technical side and say, you know, what is performative at the core? What are we doing? We’re providing a VMware-focused experience for those cloud service workloads. That’s a lot of jumble at the heart of it for the mid-market and organizations that are leveraging technologies today, mainly VMware-based, as they’re looking at how they are using those to transform their business, not just as a place to put their data. But how can that technology stack be leveraged to drive operational efficiency, cost reductions, disaster recovery, data protection, and things like how they deal with security concerns around, maybe, know, desktops, laptops, and equipment in the field? How could they leverage technology like a desktop as a service to centralize their workload and their computing and identify a more solid security posture through those solutions? So, at the core, we’re focused on those areas leveraging common technologies that are typically core to that customer’s business today.

The Role of VMware in Mid-Market Solutions

Scott Kinka:

Got it. So, you mentioned VMware a couple of times. So, you know, I guess not being a VMware customer would necessarily preclude somebody from working with you, but you also mentioned mid-market, which is, you know, I guess very prevalent, obviously that, you know, mid-market when I described the mid-market, and I talked to mid-market IT leaders, I’m like, generally large enough to have problems and small enough to know they need help on them. Right. But that generally means that you probably run into a lot of VMware in the mid-market. Mean, tell us, you know, talk a little bit about VMware in your ecosystem. You know, you’re, most people are like, Hey, we’re a cloud provider. You’re like, we are VMware-focused. What does VMware-focused mean to you?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah. And I think, you know, from our clients and, say, prospective clients, you absolutely nailed kind of their challenges, right? They’re big enough at scale that they have a budget, and they have problems, but not necessarily the budget to solve all of the problems. And when it’s budget, it’s not always dollars. It’s often time. And that’s the biggest thing here, which is an inability to budget the time to solve that. So when we look at, you know, these mid-market organizations, maybe they’re using VMware in-house today, or maybe not. Again, that doesn’t preclude someone from working with us if they don’t use it because there is exceptional value in the VMware platform. As you mentioned, there are some challenges within the ecosystem from a marketing and messaging perspective. Obviously, the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom was not necessarily messaged the best. I think everyone is aware of that. If you’re a VMware user today, if you’re not, Broadcom has not done a great job of messaging their value and direction. However, something I’ll say about it is that we are embedded as a partner, and we fully believe in the value of the VMware ecosystem. We participated with VMware as a partner and things like their partner leadership summits and the vision that they had prior to the acquisition of how they were going to evolve the platform to bring value to their clients. Broadcom is executing on that strategy. Again, maybe not with the best marketing, as we’ve all kind of gone back and forth on this, but what we see in terms of the product offering, the maturity of the technology available and the value that’s coming from the additional feature sets that are now included, as we look at specifically the mid-market, how they can leverage some of these technologies again to drive, let’s say greater efficiency or get greater capacity. or capacity to do work out of those same dollars, that puts dollars back into their IT budget to go solve other problems or to create more time or give time back. You know, it’s kind of cliche to say that we, as a managed service provider in those regards, are, you know, giving time back. That’s truly what a big value prop of an efficient platform, an efficient management strategy, is to give that time back to the team.

Scott Kinka:

Yeah. Sure. And if I’m a VMware customer listening to this right now, you know, regardless of whether I’m a VMware customer and I’m hosting it on local metal or I’m with somebody else and I’m getting licensing underline, whatever that is, and I’m nervous and I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing. What would you say to me? What helped me walk off the ledge on this one?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, think, yeah, you know, as VMware, certainly if you’re an enterprise consumer, VMware has established direct relationships with many of those, basically the top tier of the client ecosystem. So that kind of leaves all of the rest of us, whether it’s a partner or an end user, kind of that bottom stack of that pyramid. And that’s very much a community ecosystem, where there is a lot of value in knowing your peers. And knowing the ecosystem. One of the big changes is that VMware has pushed away from, obviously, the model of perpetual licensure purchasing and then support agreements on top of this recurring licensure model. So, as an end user, that’s, for many, a dramatic change. But it’s moving towards a more SaaS or consumption model, which opens up the opportunity to work with maybe cloud service providers or MSPs that you previously hadn’t had a relationship with. And with that comes a lot of extra value. So it’s not just a, hey, here’s a new way of getting a license. But in order to transition into that ecosystem, you’re going to have to make some changes over time. So that change into that model is bringing with it the additional tool sets, maybe the ability to leverage some of the new technologies that maybe weren’t being leveraged previously, things like vSAN that are now included in the licensure. For a lot of clients, it was kind of viewed as, hey, this is a big price increase. But when you look at the totality of the spending, and the totality of the value, what we’ve seen for a lot of clients is that’s actually netting out. So I think the biggest advice would be that many clients are in somewhere in a one to three-year journey right now, depending upon where they were in terms of their engagement. Had they just re-upped for a longer contract, where were they? So I think we’re going to continue to see over these next 36 months. Just kind of a revolving door of these issues and challenges where a lot of organizations may not even be aware of it. We’re having conversations with organizations that are saying, hey, we need to develop a new disaster recovery strategy. And as we look at it, we say, guys, we’ve identified here that you’re running on an older release. You’re going to be at the end of your life next year. Your hardware won’t support the next one. And your licensure is up in April of next year. What are you planning on your strategic roadmap? And many questions. We didn’t even know that was changing. So, I think an important takeaway is to be mindful of the ecosystem and start taking a strategic look at what that 36-month roadmap is. Because there is a tremendous opportunity to shift to a new model for consumption along with that licensure change. And what we’re seeing in a lot of those situations is that a knee-jerk reaction of saying, gosh, know, VM. VMware has done a terrible thing here. The messaging’s bad. I’m gonna pull the rip cord, get the parachute out, and we’re gonna jump over to some other platform, only to find out that, hey, the cost of change is high, the refactoring, the retooling, the retraining of staff. It is a very long project that is very expensive.

Leveraging Hyperscalers for Business Efficiency

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. And I mean, if somebody’s already in a license commitment, you mentioned a multi-year commitment, and certainly, like licensing coming up, is a reason to have a shorter-term conversation because, yes, it’s different. There are bundles, et cetera. We’ll pop into that in a minute. But are they able to BYO to your cloud on bare metal? And is that something that’s supported in that model, or is it really that they need to wait out the license change before they’re able to make a migration path to somebody like performance?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, I mean, every situation is unique, and there are interesting models for bare metal, we’ll say, effectively bare metal cloud consumption for customers to be able to pivot that licensure and continue to see value out of that investment. But at the same time, take advantage of, let’s say, an upgraded infrastructure that prepares them for this transition. Particularly, I’ll say clients, particularly ones that maybe have aging infrastructure that they’re looking at, maybe an upcoming refresh event. Or even not necessarily that they’re going to refresh, but they want to move up in versioning for a feature set only to find that, you know, while their hardware may still have some life in it, they can’t make that move up because, you know, version eight doesn’t support, you know, whatever a particular piece of hardware is. So, there are a number of different kinds of critical inflection points.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah, and you know, this might be a little bit geeky. I think that if we’re listening, we have VMware admins out there, and they’re thinking this way, right? Like when, when I think my personal opinion is the part that was marketed most poorly was this whole idea where like kind of broad common was like, well, all the components kind of cost the same. You just can’t get them all a card anymore. So people looked at it like, my God, I had this giant increase. As you mentioned, VSAN, how many people out there are using the hypervisor but not using VSAN, not using the security components, or whatever? You’ve got that customer in front of you, you know, is, I think I heard you say earlier, which is a fine approach, but I mean, is your advice generally like, Hey, listen, you can get value out of these other components. You should be using them. Would you be pointing them that way? Or are there creative ways to get around the bundling? Like, what are the strategies around, you know, those components? I think that’s the that’s part of this that was most poorly, I think, sort of marketed on the Broadcom side cause they were all kind of like, no, it all costs the same. Are we got it, right?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, for us, we lean into driving value out of the platform. Vasant is an easy example. And I think that’s kind of just a go-to as kind of an easy talk track of saying, you know, we all understand that, you know, you’ve got some form of compute and that’s, you know, it’s memory and CPU, and things are going on, but there’s always storage, and storage is a key component. So, As we look at what an existing environment and a footprint are, oftentimes, there will be this intense focus on, this is virtualization. I’m focused only on the licensure component relative to my computing and discarding that storage element. So when we go back and look at, again, are we looking at maybe a legacy storage platform? Is it due for a refresh? Where is it in its life cycle? As you project forward, what are you looking at from the performance needs of your app over the next three years? Is your organization maturing where you’re maybe implementing new platforms that are more intensive in terms of the need for IOPS, or maybe you have data scaling that’s more of a hockey stick type data grower because now you’re implementing data lakes, and you want to do AI and kind of all these other things that are going to impact that legacy storage. So when we look at leveraging vSAN as a component of that, that is now inclusive in that licensure. Looking at that kind of TCO story, what does it take to deliver this workload? That’s where the big value prop comes in for vSAN.

Scott Kinka:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, it’s a less, do I maintain my legacy costs argument? Because you weren’t going to maintain your legacy workloads. If we’re being honest, it was going to change anyway. So you have to look forward to being able to price backward, kind of.

Ryan DiRocco:

Exactly. Yeah. As I mentioned, it’s part of a journey, part of our story, and our core value is that we meet our customers where they are. And that doesn’t mean physical. It’s part of where they are in their journey. So looking at that and saying there’s a way that we used to do things, you know, we would go buy servers and licenses and buy a SAN and buy all these things. But as you look at this transition and what VMware is doing is they’re setting up their consumers and their organizations to be able to leverage the services model and step back from that way that we used to do things of buying storage and these platforms and say, you know, the value here is in the cohesive platform and being able to have all of these elements here, be able to scale by the drip, by the drink, whatever kind of methodology that you want. You can buy and consume that and transform them, you know, help organizations transform and move into this new model.

The Future of IT Infrastructure and Client Engagement

Scott Kinka: 

So Ryan, your website, You know, was sort of in my pre-research. We’ve been talking. This has been a very VVMware-centric conversation, but I saw Azure on there. I saw, you know, Amazon on there. Tell us a little bit about your story as it relates to the hyperscalers and how this whole VMware story works. 

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been kind of singularly focused on that track. So yeah, we’re Amazon partners. We are Azure partners. We do work in AWS, Azure, and Gand CP. We do AWS Outpost deployments. So we have a broad range of capabilities, but mostly within those ecosystems, we’re working with clients that support those traditional workloads. So whether you’re just talking about traditional VMs or traditional EC2 on the AWS side. What we’re working at supporting those workloads and as we’re working with clients in those ecosystems, what we found is there’s a lot of clients that, let’s say, particularly during the COVID period, had made a lot of knee-jerk reactions of, know, the world has changed. We’ve got to move to the cloud. They have also moved a lot of workloads into the cloud, which may be suboptimal for a true hyperscale operating model. So we’ve actually developed a significant practice around the repatriation of those workloads, taking clients that are maybe spending $60, $80, $100,000 on services that are suboptimal, say in AWS, for example, specific customer cases where they were using snapshotting for their backup methodology, which was resulting in massive cost increases, be able to repatriate that workload back into a traditional VMware-based cloud environment and use a more appropriate backup methodology for their data retention needs. They were able to save $45,000 a month simply by pivoting their model of data retention to leveraging a core toolset rather than just a kind of repetitive hyperscale process that wasn’t optimized for that type of workload case.

Scott Kinka:

Yeah, right. You brought up COVID, and also, looking at the site, you guys do a little bit of remote work. I don’t know if they’ll say a little bit. You do some remote end-user computing. I’m a huge fan of people on the show. I talk about DAS all the time. Anywhere I can squeeze it in. I know you guys aren’t a DaaS provider, but you’re all sort of an infrastructure provider for VDI effectively. Think if I have that right, tell us a little bit about that business. And do it in the vein of COVID. Like, it changed? Is there more take up for it? You know, I’ve always felt like the virtual desktop is the best idea that’s been searching for a reason. You know what I mean? It feels like a hard sell because people think it’s tough, but it’s really not.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, it’s been interesting just kind of to step back and just say, you know, watching the development of the market over time, and there’s kind of ebbs and flows, and there’s certainly many different use cases for VDI or desktop or multi-tenant type solutions. And I think the key thing is just kind of understanding for an organization what the best fit is because there are certainly great solutions, you know, kind of across the spectrum when you’re looking at things like workspaces or AVD. And then you say, okay, those are great for some of the workloads. I’ll say higher density, maybe lower performance-type workloads. Typically, we focus on the higher end of the spectrum. So when we’re looking at needs of clients that are doing things like, you know, developers, and when I say developers, these aren’t guys that are just, you know, have one terminal up and banging out a few lines of code, but where they’re, developing large applications, large data sets. They need that localized dev-test and performance. Things like CAD CAM, where you’ve got GPU resources that are requirements, even video editing or other use cases where those dedicated resources are core, but also having something where it is a controlled ecosystem where basically security is paramount and also cost control. One of the things about the desktop as a service, whether you’re operating on a hyper-scale or even a localized platform, is that if it’s not architected appropriately, the opportunity for a cost overrun in terms of, hey, you know, my sales team spun up all of their desktop instances and left them running all month, 24 hours a day. And now I’ve got this monstrous bill as an organization. There’s kind of some things that come along with that, you know, in incorrectly architected solutions from the start, it’s a very predictable cost model. So when we look at an organization and say, you know, how can you develop a process and a plan for understanding what is my expenses and organization to onboard a new team member and say, okay, you know, if I’m using a desktop and VDI solution, it’s a fixed piece of infrastructure with a very prescribed security model, a great security posture and position where you can replicate that time and time again. The concerns about things like BYOD are significantly reduced because you’re providing a tightly controlled ecosystem. But with that tightly controlled ecosystem, you’re also providing a very fixed cost structure. So it’s an opportunity to easily map out everything about what the experience is for team members and resources within the organization, but also map out exactly what that means to the business in terms of what your cost is to onboard, offboard, and manage. It’s pretty powerful.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah, definitely. I do; I love what you said about Daz being, you know, good for like sort of, you know, I always, destructible workloads. And what I mean by that is that I don’t need persistence. I can just come in, chop up, treat it like a kiosk, do my work, and shut it down. It doesn’t know I ever existed.

Ryan DiRocco:

Yeah, it’s a data entry case, right? Know, come along, spin it up, enter some data, close it down, go away.

Scott Kinka: 

Exactly. But what’s interesting for you is you’re talking about it sort of from a cloud infrastructure perspective, almost like the use case you’re trying to get after are the people who are replacing desktops every year and a half. CAD, engineers, devs, etc., are interesting. It’s definitely a different approach as opposed to trying to make the desktop simpler. You’re basically saying like, listen, you can’t afford to keep throwing your heavy meat at these applications on desktops every day. I like that. That’s interesting. Mean, you mentioned the CAD opportunity. It was one that used to come up to me all the time. There were always people who were exploring VDI just because they were like, I can’t afford machines all the time. You know what I mean?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, I mean, it’s extraordinarily expensive, and that’s, know, kind of one, again, the benefit of the cloud for all of these use cases, whether it’s VDI or, you know, traditional primary compute is that, you know, as fast as things are changing, you know, IT infrastructures and organizations, when you again talk back to that point of, know, what is that mid-market, right? That IT budget is those dollars of capex that are going out the door for these continuous refreshes. Those are dollars that could be spent in turn on, you know, expanding the skill set of the team, adding more members to the team, being able to spend more time within the business, affecting change of making IT kind of an engine that drives the business instead of just a cost center for another box that’s going on the floor.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. Totally get it. Before we jump into some fun closing remarks here, I’ll just ask it this way, know, wrap it up. We talked about a lot of stuff, like the performative, like superpower here. We sort of got into it earlier, and then we got geeky quickly. Like, where should people be thinking about you guys?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah. So specifically, we kind of touched on a lot of those things from technology, know, brand names, product ecosystems, but really at the core of it is that our belief here is that we’re really a customer service organization with a technology product. And what that means and what that turns into is the way that we engage with our clients and our process is that even early on, the very first piece of our sales process is not telling you all about who we are and what we do, but hearing what your challenges and needs are. Where are you in a business? Back to our point of being able to meet you where you are, we need to develop that understanding of where you are and what your goals and objectives are. And most importantly, what are those pain points? Because that’s what our superpower is. We’ve been here, and you have the longevity. We’ve seen the iterations and changes in technology. We’ve seen hundreds and thousands of other businesses like, you know, our customers’ business, like your business, and we can say, you know, we’ve seen these challenges and problems. We’re gonna help you attack those and overcome those. So Mr. IT director, who has six projects on the board and is only gonna get one of those done this year, we’re gonna take a look at that and say, how do we get you to two, three, four, five and that magical six? How do you get all those knocked down? That’s really our superpower. There’s a lot of technology behind it. There are a lot of great product ecosystems, but really understanding how to apply the right tool for the right job is our superpower.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. Got it, got it. I love that. It’s, know, you certainly mentioned VMware. You certainly mentioned MidMarket. You mentioned the cloud. At the end of the day, though, if all those things apply and you need somebody who’s willing to get their hands dirty, if I’m oversimplifying what you just said, right, to help you make the most effective use of it, you know, that’s what separates you guys. How’d I do? Is that okay?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, I think it’s a fair assessment. And I’ll say, you know, it is a broader technology stack and ecosystem. You know, we’ve got a lot of solutions, and we recognize that there’s some significant, back-to-the-point understanding of pain points. There’s definitely significant pain for customers right now to help, you know, navigate those waters. They’re challenging.

Fun Predictions for the Coming Years

Scott Kinka: 

Oh, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Well, this has been great, Ryan. I like to end with some fun. So, before we go, I have a couple of questions for you. The first one is an easy one, maybe, depending on how you look at it. We’ll look back at this in 12 months or 18 months. And we always do a recap episode every year. So maybe this one will even sneak in in the short term. I need a shameless prediction out of you. It doesn’t matter in what category. It can be business, sports, macroeconomics, or whatever you want it to be for the next 12 to 18 months. Just be Nostradamus for a minute.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Gosh. Let’s see, on the and all over the place. We’ll touch sports. We’ll touch on that one briefly. Let’s say so. I mentioned I came to the Atlanta market in 93 or 94. I grew up in South Florida. So, from a sports fan, I’m a transplant. Almost everyone in Atlanta is from somewhere else these days. It’s very rare you meet a native anymore, but I’m a Marlins, Dolphins, and then Gators fan. So. Baseball. The Braves just got into the playoffs. You’re a Philly fan. I’ll say the Braves are out in three, or is it four? No, they’ll be out in three. They’re out to the Padres. So you don’t have any fear of the Braves right now. So no Braves this year. Too many injuries, they’re gone. And I’m a Marlins fan anyway, so I don’t really care.

Scott Kinka: 

All right. Okay. Do you want to take it a step further? Who’s going to win the World Series then? Throw it out there.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Man, I honestly don’t know this year. I think it’s really a toss-up. I’m gonna go for a crazy one because I am a Dolphins fan, and my wife’s a Chiefs fan. They’re gonna have to get by them. But I think next year, if a healthy team and healthy people are playing, the Dolphins will have a solid shot. I thought it was this year, but I’m gonna be shameless and defer, and I’ll take it next time. I want the Dolphins to be the one.

Scott Kinka:

Okay. I mean, as a football fan, I hope to see Tua. Do you know what I mean? There’s been so much thought about the concussions with him. He’s a talented man, and he’s fun to watch.

Ryan DiRocco: 

As a sports fan, yeah, I see him out there on the field as a person. You know, I would like to see him just take health first and foremost and consider that retirement. But as a Dolphins fan, you know, hey, there are modern-day gladiators. I like to see them. They’re out on the field fighting for that win. You know, that’s a tough game.

Scott Kinka: 

Of course. Yeah. Got you. It definitely is. All right. Here’s a fun one. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made as a technology leader?

Ryan DiRocco: 

Biggest mistake, gosh, as a leader.

Scott Kinka: 

It doesn’t need to be like a leadership one; I should have managed this person better. It could be like, my God, I hit the button and foobar the whole network. Give us something fun.

Ryan DiRocco: 

No, thankfully, I haven’t done that. Man, there are moments, I won’t say they were in the States, but man, there are moments I would love to have back. I’d say earlier on, I mentioned we built a data center, and this was in 2009. It was a great learning experience, but man, it was the moment where you can kind of feel your heart sink and everything drops.

Scott Kinka: 

That wasn’t fun at the moment, clearly, but it’s fun to look back now. Yeah. Give us one.

Ryan DiRocco:

We were in the middle of expanding that facility, adding on a second power system. So it was a full two-in site, all those sorts of things, great improvements. But in the middle of that, it suffered a critical power failure and actually had a generator physically explode, rapidly disassemble itself, throw parts out of the engine block and just collapse.

Scott Kinka: 

Where’d this group come from? 

Ryan DiRocco: 

No, yeah. I mean, what happened to the big V16 shoving internal pieces out of a hole in the side of the engine? This was, this was, this was not fun. But anyway, the point being kind of a mistake or a challenge at that point in time, that was a learning experience when, you’re looking at kind of infrastructure at scale and large scale things, you can never underestimate the amount of redundancy you need to build into any process that. The event was something that was, let’s say, one of those black swans- a lifetime type of thing. You’re building in all of the efficiency and the redundancy, but as you’re deploying the redundancy, you’re exposed to that one thing: race, right? From that point forward, you know, I’ve always wanted to be a pilot, but I can’t get to be the type of pilot that I want. Cause I only want to fly a plane that’s got two engines. You don’t get there without flying one; it’s only got one, right? So it’s like that.

Scott Kinka: 

You had that problem. Yeah, I love that. Well, they say they don’t want to fall out of the sky, right? Mean, you know, they say, like, if the engine goes, you can still land it, but I don’t trust that. Just clearly don’t.

Ryan DiRocco: 

That mistake early on is definitely. I like redundancy. That was kind of an early learning lesson from there on out. The more redundancy, the better.

Scott Kinka: 

All I’m gonna ask you is a single-threaded question, though, and here’s a fun one. The world’s generator goes out, and so the next crazy event happens, and you know, I’m not sure you can pick whatever dystopian future you want, but only one application on your phone continues to work. Which one is it? You get to choose. 

Ryan DiRocco: 

Flashlight.

Scott Kinka: 

Adaguy, I like that one, he answered brilliantly, flashlight he said. No, that’s good.

 Somebody, I’ve been asking that question through like 60-odd episodes, and only one person besides you has ever said flashlight, which is a brilliant approach.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Hey, you said dystopian, but the power’s gone, right? Gotta, I can only charge it for so long. Hopefully, solar energy exists, but you know,

Scott Kinka: 

Let’s go. Yeah. Well, that’s amazing. This was a great time and a great conversation. I really appreciate your time today, Ryan. Thanks so much for being here on the Bridgecast.

Ryan DiRocco: 

Yeah, thank you, Scott. My pleasure. Happy to be here.

Scott Kinka: 

Thanks so much. We’ll hopefully see you soon on another episode.