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Know Your Costs or Die Trying: SaaS Finance, Edge AI, and Cloud Reality with Will Baccich
7 Plays3 days ago
In this episode of the Rebel Devs Podcast, hosts Tom May and Jonah May catch up with longtime friend and former colleague Will Baccich, partner at Seton Hill Partners, to break down why understanding cost is everything—especially for growing tech companies.
🔍 Key topics include:
- Why so many service providers don’t actually know what it costs them to do business
- The power and pitfalls of fractional leadership (CFOs, CIOs, and beyond)
- SaaS pricing strategies and surviving buyer pressure in commoditized markets
- Real talk on cloud vs on-prem, capital constraints, and hidden costs
- The reality check for small service providers in today’s hyperscale world
- Edge computing: where did it go, and will AI bring it back?
- Building local AI agents for tier-1 support and knowledge transfer
- How hospitals lose $10K IV pumps (yes, seriously) and how LORA tech is solving it
🔥 Bonus: Will, Tom, and Jonah get candid about the past, present, and future of storage, Veeam, object-first appliances, and the coming AI arms race in IT services.
If you're in tech, SaaS, IT services, or just love solving big problems with unconventional thinking—this is one episode you won’t want to miss.
🧠 Whether you're scaling a startup or modernizing a legacy system, "know your cost" might just become your new mantra.
📣 Mentions & Shoutouts:
- Seton Hill Partners
- Fortium Partners
- CyberFortress
- Object First
- Texas Veeam User Group Roadshow (June)
💬 Like, share, and subscribe to join the Devolution — where rebels don’t just disrupt, they evolve.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Rebel Devs Podcast
00:00:17
Speaker
Rebel Devs podcast, a show that challenges conventional thinking in the tech industry. Each episode features conversations with solutionists who have taken unconventional approaches to problem solving, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in their respective fields.
00:00:31
Speaker
Join the Devolution.
00:00:38
Speaker
join the devolution
00:00:42
Speaker
Hey RebelDev listeners, your host Tom May here on a happy Friday as we're always out and about on Fridays letting you listen in.
Special Guest Announcement and Texas Weather
00:00:50
Speaker
We have an another exciting podcast for us today and special guest as always. But before we get there, I'd love to introduce my partner in crime, Jonah may Not much.
00:01:01
Speaker
You know, the weather can't make up its mind here. We're getting dust storms. We're getting late spring temperatures. We're getting almost winter temperatures at night. It's weird. That's Texas hot, cold, and everything in between.
Tech Industry Insights with Will Bassage
00:01:13
Speaker
ah Technically, in my world, i don't know when we're going to air this, but it's a wonderful Veeam drop day security release on us, so everybody's scrambling to get that out in there. Jonah, how are you doing in that world today? Well...
00:01:26
Speaker
we are actually in the We were already in the process of validating our Cloud Connect service for 12.3 with our customer portal. So I think those upgrades were already set to start next week. So the thought is we're just going to roll the 12.3.1 as part of that since it's supposed to be bug fixes only.
00:01:43
Speaker
Very nice. Very nice. All right. Well, now we have our special guest with us, Will Bassage. And I'm going to have Will introduce himself. But before we do, Will and I worked together for, geez, probably 10 years or something.
00:01:54
Speaker
and Yeah, a little busy.
00:01:57
Speaker
Sure. I'm Will Bassage. I'm my partner at Seton Hill Partners. We provide fractional and interim CFO services. I work with c clients primarily in the tech space, a number of SaaS startups, but also in IT consulting.
00:02:14
Speaker
and um But our our firm covers a wide swath of of industry verticals, everything from real estate to construction to healthcare,
00:02:24
Speaker
um ah Pretty much every every space is covered ah by our team. We're 92 partners across the U.S. We have Texas Roots. We started in Fort Worth.
00:02:35
Speaker
We have 27 partners here in the DFW North Texas area yeah now and have been on ah ah a great growth curve this fractional leadership model seems to really make sense. It gives companies the you know in my space, particularly like the the the fast-growing SaaS businesses and whatnot gives them the chance to to have somebody that can bring in expertise and do things like help with ah pricing on ah on a large opportunity, for example, or manage manager a capital raise or
00:03:14
Speaker
structure debt correctly for the organization um and and and not necessarily devote all that time to one organization and spread myself across.
00:03:25
Speaker
I work with four different companies in this space right now and and and ah have have a good time doing that. Background-wise, I've always been a technology guy. I'll give away how old I am.
00:03:39
Speaker
I had my first job as a COBOL coder um When I was 17 years old and in 1976, and I got paid $2.35 an hour, but I was very grateful for the opportunity because it was a toehold in my career in technology.
00:03:58
Speaker
But I've always been on the on the finance side and I'm also a CPA, um but never really a traditional CPA. I've been a tech guy, I've been a finance guy, and and and I really enjoy where I am these days.
00:04:11
Speaker
and And yeah, to Tom's point, we work together, Tom and have worked together probably a total of 10 years, and Jonah... ah some subset of that time as well. And um it's it's very interesting to catch up with you guys to and to hear.
00:04:27
Speaker
yeah I've been ah bit ah been away from that ah backup, DR, recovery, data protection, cloud storage space. I've been away from that space for ah two and a half years now.
00:04:39
Speaker
And I'd love to hear what's going on and how things have changed and what you guys are up to.
Cost Structures and Pricing Decisions
00:04:45
Speaker
I think we're going to talk a little bit about cloud versus on-prem, but something I want to share with our background was when we met, I was very much an operations guy. That's kind of my first role.
00:04:55
Speaker
And I'll be with you, really helped me take a little bit. I business degree, of course, so not a traditional IT t guy, if you will, just kind of a guy that needed a degree that they didn't really have an IT t degree and it worked well. And I took some accounting, probably too much that I really don't want to go into because it was all my...
00:05:14
Speaker
uh you know extras i had to fill electives had to fill in with accounting classes only that worked on my schedule so uh not really good at it but never really thought it had a place and then working with you really watching you zero into every dollar and cents out there a lot of our listeners are veeam centric companies a good chunk are service providers or work with partners And something that you helped me understand was we were never really a Veeam company. It seemed like we were a storage company. It was always about what did it cost us. And as I interface in with companies today, and this is why I wanted to bring you on, they're often struggling with their cost structure. They're looking at their competition and saying, well, this is what they cost, but we want to be boutique and cost but and charge more because we can do these things. But at the end of the day, when you start asking them what things cost,
00:06:05
Speaker
You'll be shocked that most of our partners cannot answer that question, Will. they Oh, man, that is such a good point. Yeah, I mean, and and don't get me started on it because, you know, you're going to need three podcasts um to to cover it.
00:06:21
Speaker
Because, you know, to to answer the question, how much did that cost? Um, it's, it's just never as, as plain and simple, especially when you're dealing with something that is deployed over, over a period of time, whether that's multiple months or multiple years or anything like that.
00:06:41
Speaker
How do you measure that cost is an, and is it a variable cost? Is it cost goods sold or is it over that? how you, how you categorize all those things and which ones are important. Right.
00:06:51
Speaker
I mean, I i have, I, I have conversations where it goes like this. That's not important. Oh yes, it is. That's not important. Or, or that's really important.
00:07:03
Speaker
Um, well, why, right you know that that there' is there is there is the the ah There's a whole lot of opportunity and cost. And that's why i like the subject of cost so much.
00:07:17
Speaker
because Because if you understand how that cost behaves ah relative to both your profits and the value of the business, um you you can you can create some magic. And it's wonderful for um understanding it in the pricing conversation.
00:07:35
Speaker
you know ah if If a large opportunity comes for a customer, ah its yeah especially in a situation where it's so large that that the prospective customer has as big bargaining power, right um they're going to they're going to say, okay, yeah, i know youre i know what you want to sell this for, but here's what we want to buy it for.
00:07:57
Speaker
and so And so then the question of what does it cost to deliver it and can we deliver it properly? and profitably at the price that this guy wants to pay for it.
00:08:10
Speaker
And the most powerful thing you can do is is if you can come back and go, yeah, we can do that. Oh, should I, but should I send over the contracts?
00:08:22
Speaker
Right. And, and weirdly i become part of the sales motion. Um, at, even though I'm the CFO, right. Um, that is the most fun for me when I can help a business grow by understanding the numbers that wealth, um,
00:08:41
Speaker
um'm I'm going to translate a little bit into the Veeam world, right? um Back in one of my first marketing classes, I remember that we basically took, don't remember the exact terms, but it was the concept of if I have a unique product, I can sell my unique product and say why it's unique and somebody will want it. It'd be very attractional, right? In niche marketing.
00:08:58
Speaker
I want to sell like Starlink. I'm on Starlink a lot. There's not really another Starlink. You live in the country, outskirts, you travel, as you RV. There's not really alternatives. You just want that product because you need it. It fits it.
00:09:12
Speaker
But when we start looking at things like salt, I remember it was like Morton salt versus this salt versus this salt. You can't really differentiate your product so much. I think in the Veeam ecosystems now, we all see Veeam as the product. We all have our spin off of it, especially on the cloud side.
00:09:29
Speaker
I'll say Veeam. It is the same. So what is your marketing pitch? It's I do it better than some other guy. You might say I have a portal. Well, it's expected everybody has a portal. Why i back it up securely?
00:09:40
Speaker
These are all known entities. So now you're just going, why service it better? Well, that doesn't change your price because I think you're right when the customer's on the other side and saying, okay, I don't care what you charge. This is what I'm willing to pay.
00:09:54
Speaker
If I don't know my cost, how am I there? I always have to remember these people, or remind them and say, you're basically out there doing the same pitch these other guys are. You have your human side, your connection, your networking. But at the end of the day, they believe all things are true about the service presented from all their vendors.
00:10:12
Speaker
So knowing those pricing and that's where these deals die on the table, Will, like they just don't know. And they're like, this is a thousand dollars. The customer is like 800. And they're like, OK, well, did they just say yes when they should have said no, because it's going to cripple them?
00:10:26
Speaker
And I think that's what our listeners are really or should be paying attention to right now as they listen to you is the value of that. Yeah, one of my favorite cost stories, and and again, you're going to have to tell me to stop here at some point, but one of my favorite cost stories is about the idea of absorption costing.
00:10:47
Speaker
um ah And and and ah absorption costing is is is the concept that if you go buy a car, um well, it took materials and labor to make that car.
00:10:59
Speaker
So the labor is is a part of the cost that they look at when when you go to the dealership and you know the guy says, well, I can't sell below this because that's because that's my cost. Let's abstract that a little bit.
00:11:12
Speaker
Let's pretend that you're buying a Tesla and there is no middleman. you're buying You're buying the car from the manufacturer. um And he's you know he's probably going to say, yeah know I've got a price here and and here's my cost and I've got to have some margin, but my cost is my cost and I can't sell below that.
00:11:31
Speaker
Well, I don't know how Tesla does it. I would i would imagine that they've thought this through on ah on a deeper level than maybe General Motors or Ford. um because they seem to be progressive about these kinds of ideas.
00:11:43
Speaker
um But ah this this idea of absorbing labor costs into the finished good, ah ah it came from Henry Ford.
00:11:54
Speaker
And and and so Ford yeah had had had but the But the giant difference between Ford's production and manufacturing um back in the 1920s, whenever this happened, was that if on a Wednesday afternoon, he didn't need to make cars on Thursday because demand was slack, he sent his entire labor force home and they didn't get paid for Thursday or Friday or until or until they got called back.
00:12:25
Speaker
Well, today, the same group of guys shows up every Friday, whether they've been making cars or not. Okay, the balance the balance of power has shifted a little bit more toward labor.
00:12:37
Speaker
And so labor is actually really behaving like a fixed cost. I mean, granted, you can have layoffs and you can close a plant and you can downsize and so forth. But as long as, ah you know, within within normal timeframes, months or a quarter or even a few years, you but the the the amount of dollars that you write checks,
00:13:01
Speaker
or in payroll as a car manufacturer really only changes very gradually as you add another the plant or or whatever, right?
00:13:12
Speaker
So to consider that labor is actually really a part of that car might not be valid. Maybe what you should only be looking at is the cost of the materials. When you decide whether or not I can sell, I can ah can run a special and I can sell below my cost, so to speak. um and And traditional accounting, that's a terrible idea, you're losing money.
00:13:38
Speaker
But if you've got an inventory that needs to move and and i you you can get cash from that inventory, you're actually out or off doing that transaction below the traditional cost because those labor cost dollars are gone.
00:13:55
Speaker
Now, it will show up in in your public company audited, generally accepted accounting principles, financial statements. as as lower gross profit or even negative gross profit if you sell it below the cost of materials plus labor.
00:14:12
Speaker
But the business is better off and your actual your actual real earnings or are better when you do it. we we could run the We could run the numbers and and it's and it's very a very interesting exercise.
00:14:25
Speaker
And ah and it it it holds it totally holds true in some slightly different ways in it t and cloud that it's just as important to understand the behavior of your costs. And that's just one one scenario.
00:14:37
Speaker
you the the The common scenario that we have in cloud and IT t is is if I'm standing up infrastructure, Um, uh, what, what is, what is the price that I need to, ah rent out that infrastructure essentially to my customer?
00:14:55
Speaker
What is the price that I need ah and how much can I pay for the infrastructure I'm buying?
00:15:02
Speaker
No, and I love that we're talking about manufacturing because I'm going to throw it over to the newly graduated college guy here in a moment because I'm going to tee it up a little bit. But you and I actually talked about work in progress at one point and you started telling me all this automotive stuff. And I was like, that's so interesting because I was an ITIL guy. And where did it all come out of?
00:15:23
Speaker
British automotive manufacturing, right? So yeah it ties in. So I don't know if it's because we're dudes and we like talking about cars and stuff or what, but like it just translates into all. So I'm tying it over to the the new college grad here because one, I know he took a class in ITIL at some point. So he should have some comments. But Jonah, you're also a cloud service provider. So, I mean, don't give away the inside stuff here, but maybe hypothetically how you deal with some of these things, because I'm sure what Will's talking about resonates with you on your side.
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it does. And I very much like to be a fly on the wall for these conversations and retain what I can, because especially, you know, since our global data vault days, you know, I'm not writing code necessarily or onboarding customers in our support desk anymore. You know, I'm on the pre-sales team as the sale primary sales engineer. I'm on the product team as the product architect and product engineering manager. So,
00:16:15
Speaker
You know, kind of as we'll spoke to, as we're having conversations with customers, it there's always conversations around, well, what sort of discount can we afford to offer? oh and as we're looking to refresh infrastructure or go to reselling and white labeling services in the public cloud or going more into the SaaS offering, it's okay, what's our cost of goods for that?
00:16:38
Speaker
What sort of markup should we put on that? You know, how do we maximize profitability while falling inappropriately with the market in terms of features and pricing? And how can we maximize margins while still aligning with that market price?
00:16:54
Speaker
You know? No, that's It's kind of, there's two battles to be fought. One is negotiate the best deal you can negotiate. Obviously, selling for a higher price ah is always going to be better than selling at a lower price.
00:17:12
Speaker
But the real question comes when the when the choice is selling at a lower price versus not selling.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I find myself having conversations ah in that regard where sometimes with the sales, you know, i find a lot of salespeople that I've worked with tend to focus more on the closing the revenue and bringing in the revenue.
00:17:34
Speaker
And there has to be conversations on but on what it's really costing us, you know, while we might be getting that, you know, that increased revenue on paper, kind of like you were speaking to about lower or negative gross margins, you know, what is that costing us in our infrastructure to maintain?
00:17:51
Speaker
Or even going back to the labor cost, you know, maybe this is a very high demand, low revenue customer that takes a lot of work to onboard that takes a lot of work to support overall, that you know, maybe we're only getting $200 a month for that customer.
00:18:06
Speaker
Maybe if we instead had chased down, you know, a thousand dollar a month customer, it would have been a similar amount of labor on our part for much more profit. Yeah, you know, um you know our are you know founder, investor, Anthony, you know when I worked with him on these kinds of issues, he was always um the one who was easily agreeable to ideas about, you know, it's always powerful to be able to say yes, ah to to to look at our costs in in in ways that that some people may not understand
00:18:43
Speaker
think about to, to consider. Um, but, uh, you know the the, and, and, and, and I would get pushback sometimes from, from sales, you know, where, where there'd be a situation where, ah customer wants to pay, you know, uh,
00:19:01
Speaker
X minus five and, and, and sales is going, yeah, that we're just not making enough money at that level. And I'm like, it's fine. Go ahead, get the, win the deal.
00:19:13
Speaker
If, if it is still profitable, um, and, and, and the only, the only ever pushback we'd get from Anthony was, uh, don't sell too many small deals.
00:19:28
Speaker
right Because we always underestimate the ah effort required for each and every customer, especially when you get to hundreds or even thousands of customers. right ah All of a sudden, you've got you know just just this ongoing burden in every little way.
00:19:46
Speaker
whether it whether it's support, whether it's invoicing, whether it's collections, whether it's just just general customer service. you know At some point, those those things become big factors, and and you know it it takes the same it takes the same effort, generally speaking, to do many of those things for a tiny customer as it does for a large customer.
00:20:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, and, you know, we touched on like the labor costs and the effort level, but another aspect I tend to bring up with it too is, you know, in a perfect world, you know, you'd have unlimited labor resources and this would not exist. But let's be real. It's not a perfect world. We all have constraints.
00:20:26
Speaker
I might be so having an engineer pour 20 hours a week into that customer because they're very high that, you know, you have to hold their hand a lot to get them through that onboarding and then to support them long term. That's 20 hours a week that that same person could be spending on other higher dollar customers we already have, you know, reducing our churn.
00:20:47
Speaker
But isn't that really also the growth of your own company? I mean, let's talk about different areas, right? Jonah, you are in this world where you can look at revenue and decide if you want it or not. Let's take like a different dev. I'll be a little transparent here. Like we're newer, we're upstarting.
00:21:01
Speaker
What Will's saying about fixed labor costs, that's a real deal. Whether that my guy's working or not, on a customer he's still paid to be in that seat so things we struggle with is well if this is our price point and somebody has a budget can we try to maybe limit some service and meet it a lot of times what we find more often than not it's not a limit of a service but ah ah a scope creep right you're so good at backing up our stuff could you just administer our office 365 and we've said yes before we're it guys if we were a huge company
00:21:34
Speaker
it would be like, no way we need to be pointed ninjas at what we do standardization for training and ops reasons. Right now we're like, well, if it can keep the lights on, if it avoids a, you know, capital expense, if it does whatever we can keep going. So I think it's also where your company is because the listeners are all over the map. We have the big guys, we've got these little guys coming in.
00:21:55
Speaker
And I think this is a good transition into, ah on-prem versus cloud. So I'll kind of preface a little bit in Veeam terms, and then we'll move to general orgs, right?
Cloud vs. On-Prem Solutions
00:22:05
Speaker
if you were I get asked this question all the time, consulting with cloud providers, because I do that behind the scenes. And they're always asking me, well, you were with Global Data Vault, and now you know you're out there and you know the business.
00:22:17
Speaker
What would your advice be? And my answer is, and maybe Will would say the same thing. I'm like, that's not the business to be in. It's too late. you're You're not going to compete with the big boys. You're not going to keep up with the capital expenses.
00:22:28
Speaker
So if you're going to do this, it is now time to take advantage of those Veeam cloud service providers that do aggregation or Veeam data cloud and have a sales team and support team and not be the infrastructure team.
00:22:41
Speaker
Spin it that way. And this comes down to that question of costs or like, but that costs me more money. And I'm like, well, except you don't have all those hidden costs that Will was referencing. So um those shadow IT t costs hurt us so bad. As an ops guy, I built my life around time tracking and looking and seeing what does it really cost us to onboard a certain customer, but it comes down to my company. So let's pivot into a little bit of the cloud world and whatnot in here.
00:23:08
Speaker
So are we on-prem? Are we moving to the cloud? We know data protection exists, but I think let's talk religion. You know, I've always loved on-prem. Cloud is just somebody else's computer, as they say, and with less access. So and our retro in our respective areas, like where are we seeing things? Like, ah let's go over to Jonah first. Jonah, where are you? Do you see it in cloud or on-prem? And I know you're a cloud service provider, so I'll help you.
00:23:33
Speaker
We're not talking about backing up to the cloud, but we're kind of talking compute resources. so Both. so what we're seeing and what we've seen a lot of other vam service providers do is you know when you were talking about you know telling the startups hey it's too late to be a service provider you can't compete on cost or scale now that you know vem and other backup products in general are increasingly supporting things like s three compatible storage We're even finding the same as one of the largest beam providers and, you know, with our half dozen other backup products, you know, we cannot compete with the Amazons and the Wasabi's and the back ways isn't that whoever else is of the world.
00:24:11
Speaker
You know, in some cases we think it's for maybe like 90, 95% of our customers and immutable offsite backup with some, maybe some additional services and support built on top of it is enough for our customers. so So we're evaluating where we used to only really use those sorts of things for maybe long-term retention and archival of backups.
00:24:32
Speaker
And we're starting to maybe reevaluate and see where we can bring that into our portfolio as a lower cost offering. Wherein if you just want that cookie cutter level of service, you know, we'll resell.
00:24:45
Speaker
white label where we can provide some additional services and support for those massive products and solutions that we will never be able to compete with that scale. And then if you need something more specialized, more customized beyond that, then we're still bringing you into our data centers in most cases because It's more economical for us to run things like virtual machines and storage in our data centers we found outside of backup storage.
00:25:12
Speaker
but So Jonah- Is to go to an AWS or an Azure in most cases. Let me ask you this. When I think about the evolution of ah IT infrastructure and and what we talked about um a little bit, a few minutes before we we started our recording,
00:25:28
Speaker
was the, you know, what comes around goes around ah yeah in the IT world, so to speak. um You know, we seem to be headed toward ah even even larger scale infrastructure in a lot of ways, particularly as it relates to AI.
00:25:43
Speaker
But just a preface question, so to speak.
Future of AI and Edge Computing
00:25:47
Speaker
um What happened to the concept of edge?
00:25:52
Speaker
Edge? It's ironic that you asked me that, because we actually sell Veeam appliances that we we decided to name Edge Cloud ah last year. um I mean, yeah it's a little interesting. I mean, edge if you look up what edge computing is, it technically meets the definition of it from the perspective of you have our central cloud, and then we're using it as almost like a local cloud and vault.
00:26:17
Speaker
at the customer site, you know, for yeah the three of us having been at GDB, you know, it's kind of the same take as what we used to call the local data vaults for storage craft and beam when we sold those once upon a time. Yeah. And at the same time, it's not really what you consider most people, I think to consider traditionally be edge computing.
00:26:37
Speaker
You know, I think most people think about it like, you know, you're, leasing some bandwidth and some caching from someone like Cloudflare. So you're providing like local website resources, not necessarily like, hey, I'm running something in my office, but we've seen so many companies shift to the cloud that at this point, like local offices or data centers have almost become that edge computing.
00:26:58
Speaker
Right, right. and and And Edge does not seem to be a particularly common... that that It seems like there's been a... I suppose if you could look at, what is it, Google Trends um ah over the past five years, Edge was edge was a much bigger deal three or four years ago um than it is today.
00:27:16
Speaker
ah you had You even had you had data center operators working to build... um uh, low latency, small data centers in secondary markets and, or even like we saw here in Dallas, some guys were building data, small data centers inside big buildings, uh, to provide that low latency. And, and that, that, that idea seems to have fizzled a little bit, maybe not completely, but at least a little bit.
00:27:39
Speaker
And so the thing that I'm wondering about, as I think about what's happening with AI, um, you know, what I think so many people believe is is kind of the next step in AI is is custom agents, right? We're going to write AI agents for our businesses that'll be custom and unique.
00:28:01
Speaker
And they'll probably, they'll probably in most cases, be very so very proprietary and and a whole lot of secret sauce. you know mean we We could all think about how in in the in the backup and disaster recovery world, how a much secret sauce we accumulated in terms of of the go all the mechanics of doing a recovery when ah when a ransomware event it it you know springs to life and we and we have this urgent recovery for for a client.
00:28:30
Speaker
and And not not just in the in in the in in that moment, but just in the day-to-day moment of supporting the customer and so forth. I mean, I could see tremendous ah opportunity for you know and a business like yours to scale using AI because because you could train the techs that need to be involved in both the day-to-day administration and then the urgent recovery situations, you can train those guys with the AI tools.
00:28:57
Speaker
And if the AI tools are trained on what all the guys that in the organization have learned already and have and have been doing for a while, you've got this great proprietary AI agent.
00:29:07
Speaker
would you put that would you Would you put that up in hyperscale? it know allow It's funny that you meant to get into this because one or two of the employees on my team have actually been working on exactly this the last several months for us.
00:29:24
Speaker
Viewers, we did not put plan this. No. Yeah, so they they have actually, you know, they've been tinkering in their home labs, they've got some spare GPUs they've been putting into servers, and they've been starting to build and fine tune and train their own local large language models, train specifically on things like internal knowledge bases, Veeam knowledge bases, public Veeam user guides, you know, other public resources like the Veeam community hub, in order to try and give a well refined agent that can not only help our internal support techs, but also maybe act as almost like a tier one support chat bot to our customers.
00:30:00
Speaker
And the idea with it was we wanted it to all be locally hosted so that we could control the data. We, you know, we could control the access and not have it, you know, talking to an open AI or something where we couldn't necessarily guarantee the sovereignty of the data, or we didn't necessarily want to pay exorbitant fees for API tokens or transactions or whatever they're called.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, you you probably want those agents to look at your customer's data. And so that absolutely has to be proprietary and secret. Right. Well, and a and you're right. That's some of it too. How can we take some of our data and start using AI and some custom trained algorithms and models to identify trends? Like, Hey, we see a map, you know, kind of like Veeam has done for years with Veeam one, they've got the ransomware alarms. Well, that where they will look at things like suspicious CPU usage or data size changes and alert you to potential compromise in your environment.
00:30:55
Speaker
But more on the services side of it, you know, almost how can we maybe take some of that data and ingest it and identify indicators of churn where we might need to go and proactively reach out to a customer because maybe we think we're at risk of losing them because it looks like their data might be moving elsewhere. Or maybe we see a forecast for massive data growth with them so we can proactively reach out to negotiate, you know, 12-month commitment on a higher storage commit so that they can receive discounts on that storage consumption.
00:31:25
Speaker
God, that would have been so cool back in the day, right? Yeah. um and so So does this does this does this lead to something along the lines of edge compute for AI agents?
00:31:40
Speaker
Maybe i will say to, you know, bringing it outside of the Veeam, I'm going to equally pigeonhole it as much. You see a lot of it too, honestly, in the, in the smart home, in the home lab communities too, you know, people spinning up their own Facebook models, running them in their garages. And even in some cases, some of those systems are getting to the point where people are doing their own custom voice assistance to replace, you know, the Googles and the Amazon echoes of the world.
00:32:06
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, somebody on this call may have done that, and you might have been talking about it. Except, Jon, this isn't really Jono that we're talking to.
00:32:17
Speaker
Well, you know I'm not the only a one. You know, I will say... You know, i've I host some of my own GitHub repositories for some of it, but, you know, none of that is stuff I came up with. that's I'm just going out there. I'm taking two or three publicly accessible packages from NVIDIA and open source projects and making them all talk to each other with some help from Python and ChatGPT.
00:32:38
Speaker
yeah Wow, easy. out Sure, we'll all do that right now. Right after the call, we'll just write our own home as... Before our three o'clock call. Yeah. um You know, what's scary though, is we're all talking about this and I go back to the James Cameron and the Terminator kind of Skynet thing.
00:32:54
Speaker
And what was really scary was, and a lot of people didn't really watch it, but it is one of my favorites is Terminator three. And the whole concept was how Skynet came up was there were viruses infiltrating Department of Defense systems that they couldn't get to stop.
00:33:09
Speaker
So they unleashed this AI system to stop it and so stop the threats. And so they inject in the AI and it traverses all the networks. And within moments, you're like, whatever crisis room that's all red and flashing and all of a sudden it all silences and they're cheering.
00:33:28
Speaker
And all of a sudden in the background, they start seeing launches happen from all the nuclear weapons. And it was now humans were the existential threat. Joan and I talk a little bit about this to to carry through is they discovered what a couple of weeks ago. I think we said that AI were given prompts to basically ah simulate things.
00:33:49
Speaker
deletion and termination and to prevent it and it self-replicated itself to avoid and lied to the user and or and it at least attempted to escape its sandbox and replicate itself to preserve itself I think this was back when they were doing the initial tests for chat GPT for Omni back in December.
00:34:06
Speaker
There's some white papers out on it. They basically go through all these simulations of if we removed the guardrails, what would it be capable of to help ensure safety when they release it to the public? so So we've gone from Henry Ford to the Terminator apocalypse.
00:34:21
Speaker
There you go. That's how a podcast works, my friend. That's the podcast. This is why we release on a Friday because people are like, oh, Veeam stuff, a little bit beyond Veeam. And they're either avoiding work or driving to work. and And, you know, they get something or they hopefully aren't watching it while they drive because their hats are available. But yeah.
00:34:40
Speaker
So H computing. um Will, you talk to me a little bit about like asset tracking and hospitals and stuff. I think somebody you were working with. Yep. Not mistake. So ah let's get a little geeky tech and kind of pivot a little bit into that. Tell us short about that.
Innovative Technology Applications in Healthcare
00:34:54
Speaker
So what I learned, uh, with, um, ah my client, uh, true spot, um, uh, who, who'll be winning, an M and a award for, for an investment that they took, uh, here, here in North Texas, uh, here shortly, um,
00:35:13
Speaker
is that they they started in the automotive market and um Mike Hannah went to go buy a car. He'd already picked out the car on a previous visit.
00:35:25
Speaker
And I'm i'm paraphrasing the story. I don't have all the details exactly right. But went back to to go write check and um they couldn't find it.
00:35:37
Speaker
And and out of frustration and he was a he was a radio engineer business guy from with a background from um both nokia and ericsson uh and he he thought geez i could solve this problem so so uh they've they've partnered with reynolds reynolds in the automotive space uh to pursue uh ah tracking of cars on lots as well as keys on lots.
00:36:09
Speaker
Uh, and that's a, and that's cool growing business. And then, and now, and now the, the second major vertical for them is healthcare. care And what I had no idea was that a thing like an IV pump cost $10,000.
00:36:23
Speaker
ten thousand dollars Um, and of course, that's just what I've been told. i haven't seen the invoices, but, um, and And the reality is, ah obviously, a hospital can't buy ah an unlimited amount of those kinds of assets.
00:36:42
Speaker
and And particularly the ones that are smaller, like IV pumps, well, nurses will hoard them. They'll put them in a desk drawer because they're scared they're going to run out and not have one when they need it.
00:36:53
Speaker
Or they're small enough that they'll get rolled up with the the laundry and and maybe even go out with trash. um Or they'll but they'll walk out of the hospital with a patient and ah in a completely legitimate situation, but never come back.
00:37:08
Speaker
um ah there's There's a huge opportunity to control costs and and track assets. ah You know, we need we need a machine that does this kind of treatment and and and we need it now. Where the heck is it?
00:37:23
Speaker
Right. So ah and using radio technology is a is a cool ah approach to this problem. You know, the the I think I think most people would think, well, you're going to want to use the GPS technology for this.
00:37:37
Speaker
The problem with with GPS technology is you have to talk to satellite. Satellite knows exactly where it is in two dimensions, you know, ah longitude, latitude, so to speak, or X and Y. but it has no idea where it is in in the vertical dimension, or as they call it, Z, right?
00:37:52
Speaker
um Because it's 18,000 miles away, and um you just can't get that level of precision. With a radio technology, you can say it's on the third floor, or it's on the fifth floor, or it's on the second floor, like immediately. and And so so these guys have built both both the the radio network, or the receivers and the transmitters, and they've got patents on that, this very clever intellectual property.
00:38:15
Speaker
And then and they they've they've done an amazing job with the software backend um ah processing the data and presenting it in a nice, clean user interface. And they've got one for healthcare. care They've got one for automotive.
00:38:27
Speaker
And the company's cool and growing. um it's very It's a very interesting business. ah And it does present ah the same sort of ah accounting and finance problems, such as really is our cost?
00:38:41
Speaker
what really is our cost Um, you know, how does how does the cloud cost play? What is our, what is our, what is our, our cost for the physical infrastructure that has to go on premises at a hospital or a car dealership, uh, and so forth. So, so, uh, and, and, and ah and, and grow it rapidly. So there's always the constant demand for capital, you know, as you can't scale a business like that without capital, um, because, because there's physical assets involved.
00:39:08
Speaker
It's been really fun and very interesting to work with them. No, it sounds absolutely it wickedly cool. My wife works for a subsidiary of Toyota and their project was focused on or featured on the Today Show.
00:39:21
Speaker
And they did the same sort of thing with radar inside of a vehicle, I believe. And so what it did is it stemmed out of the project of, you know, a child left in the backseat, if you will. And what they were able to do was not just use camera technology, but this system would actually say how many people were in the car. And as I listened to them talk, it was things like they could tell if somebody was having medical issues. They were having problems if like an Uber driver, you know, was in distress or a passenger in the back and they could alert authorities. And it did so much more.
00:39:51
Speaker
But one of the fun things I remember is they played the old like clown car game. Like how many people can we stuff in the car? and see, and they'd get like 16 or 20 people and would say, it's this many women, this many men, this many age group, and it could adeptify this all.
00:40:04
Speaker
um That's crazy. Objects too, like, hey, you left your golf clubs and the club. Yeah. And so they took that technology and they're spinning it into a wired city in Japan, as I believe it. And there if yeah I don't know what they're doing with it, but it's kind of one of those premises of, remember, used to have the I fall and can't get up button.
00:40:24
Speaker
Well, imagine now if you had something and they'd be like on the third floor whatever, we think somebody went down or... And all this technology is so cool like that. But you're right. It's not GPS based because of Z. So um I got really excited when you talked about keys. I'm like, I'm trying to air tag my keys because I swear to God, now that we're not putting them in things, I never know where they are for my own life as a personal user. I'd love to have a system like that in my house where I could just tag my crap and be like, where's my wallet?
00:40:52
Speaker
Like there's still no applications. Yeah. Uh, I think, I think that one is going to be important for the next few years. And, um, I, I think about my grandson and I'll bet you he never knows what a car key was.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah. Right. That's crazy. ah that theyll Give me the keys. Dad will be like, it won't be that way. Somehow, somehow dad's going to give him permission through, through some other mechanism, but it ain't going to be, uh, give me the keys. Dad.
00:41:22
Speaker
yeah the way You're rolling the windows down. and Yeah, well, it'd be great is ah imagine grounding your kid. Like back then, they'd have a secret key or something else other way. Now be like, nope, denied all day long.
00:41:36
Speaker
ah No, that's wicked. um We're going to restrict you to go into the grocery store. Right? That'd be amazing. Call with Di if he leaves mile off of a puncture.
00:41:48
Speaker
ah half of above on Pull over. Geofence your teenage drivers. Oh, geez. Yeah, I know already people do that with different as this would be a whole new level of um of complexity.
Upcoming Events and Collaborations
00:42:02
Speaker
um I'm going to give a couple of shout outs here because we're we're coming towards the end. So just a couple of things is first of all, and I don't know, Jonah, did you get object first news today as well? Or am I speaking? just I did.
00:42:13
Speaker
OK, good. So I've actually got a little more news than you have, actually. All right, so I'll start with mine and then you can jump in there because its kind of both of us. So Jonah and I are part of an influencing program called Object First Aces.
00:42:25
Speaker
It's kind of like the Veeam Vanguard program, but it's for all object first Veeam storage. And we're with a really great, talented group of people over there. Nico Stein, he's been on the podcast, Chris Childerhouse.
00:42:35
Speaker
And of course, I want to give a special shout out to Jeff Burke, who's their community manager. Jeff is an amazing Veeam Vanguard legend. He's also their big Kubernetes guy. And so they put out our renewal. So Jonah and I were in the inaugural class last year.
00:42:49
Speaker
So Ratmere and team and all those guys have honored us again to be a fool Yeah, I also see Harry Curlin is over there now. Yeah, yeah. it's it's It's a big team. So yeah ah kind of how Veeam grew up channel and whatnot, it's kind of like Ratmir at the third time through doing things a little bit different.
00:43:07
Speaker
And today we were renewed in that program. So that was really exciting and is always an honor to be on the inside of Object First. ah Jonah, what would you have some add-on to being an ace? Did they make you like the super ace co-pilot or something? Sort of. I'm i'm rereading. I can't fully leak it yet. It'll be a couple weeks. But no, there's some stuff going on behind the scenes to expand the program and expand Object First's community presence. And Maurice has done a lot of work, helped with Jeff behind the scenes, and I've helped kind quality control and test some of it. So we've been asked to take a little more active role in a couple of community projects than the rest of the ACES, it sounds like.
00:43:44
Speaker
Is this anything to do with will it be coming out like in tandem with Veeamon, do you think? Or did they not? I don't know. I'm like, I got the email about it Tuesday and we're potentially meeting to discuss it tomorrow. Like I was going to leak it. And then I went back and I reread. Sorry, Jeff, you know, the subject line of the email is literally top secret.
00:44:03
Speaker
ah Well, here's the hilarious part is now I'm going to be like, well, forget giving Jeff a shout out because apparently I'm not cool enough to be in that program with you and Maurice. So I'm just the, oh, we're going to audit and be a dork guy. Like, okay. like Apparently you didn't spend enough hacking and breaking down Oopi and beating it up like I, like Maurice and I did with the virtual appliances. Cause You know, I kept sending just Jeff stuff and I kept getting worried that someone over object first was going to have an aneurysm and be like, what are they doing over there with some of the weird happens stuff I was trying to do to it.
00:44:35
Speaker
Well, it's an honor to be a part of that program. Some of the greatest minds are over there, and that's what's been good about the Vanguard program. It's just where we all reach out. The second thing I wanted to bring up is ah as we approach June, we're hoping to get the Texas Veeam User Group Roadshow going.
00:44:50
Speaker
So Jonah and I are your leaders for the state of Texas. We are hoping to roadshow. I think it's June 5 through 7, but we're talking about... 5 through 5, I think. 3 to 5. Okay, I can't remember that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is...
00:45:01
Speaker
And it's going to be Austin, Houston, and Dallas. So look for some coming events out there. And I'm going to throw a shout out to our friends at Cloud IBR. They're helping organize it with Becky Cook over there. So Becky, thank you.
00:45:14
Speaker
Also Sterling Wilson, they're one of the field CTOs for Object First. Great Veeam person now over at Object First. Sterling's been real... ah helping us over there along with Ryan post to bring this about. So we're hoping that and some of our other partners like backblaze are going to help surround it. And we'll have Veeam resources there in person as well. Like we always do.
00:45:36
Speaker
ah Jason Buffington is going to come out and help support us with that. So we'll do a little AMA over there, but it'll be a great time to network and learn a little bit more about Veeam. We haven't really come up with some great topics yet, just because we're waiting for Veeam on and, uh,
00:45:50
Speaker
Something to keep in mind is after Veeamon, there's going to be a lot of recaps, but very special to the Rebel Devs podcast, Rick Vanover is going to be with us, and he's giving us the first exclusive post-Veeamon interview.
00:46:01
Speaker
So Veeamon will represent themselves on the podcast about everything. So a lot of things moving and shaking. So definitely keep watching for us out there. Yeah, for those for those user group events, ah ah you guys, I hope you can reach out and get ah my client, Fortium, who provides fractional CIO, CTO, and CISO leadership to the midsize and enterprise market.
00:46:28
Speaker
um I think i think there they'd be a huge contributor in that business. ah Mid-market backup data protection, disaster recovery, ah cloud storage ah ecosystem, just a bunch of really bright, talented a leadership team there serving clients in those in in in virtually every industry.
00:46:54
Speaker
Oh, we'll definitely reach out. And it's a great group. We have some small shocks in there. We have those midsize. Interestingly enough, the last Dallas one, we had three Fortune 100 companies in there. And I'm talking like defense.
00:47:05
Speaker
I'm talking food industry, like companies that I'm shocked showed up. But what was interesting is we did this whole Linux hardened repository versus object first and what the pros and cons were with this whole thing.
00:47:18
Speaker
And We were talking about it. They had no idea what we were talking about. We started talking about S3 storage. And so the simplest things that we take for granted, these massive companies were just revolutionized for free because we said, listen, coming to a Texas user group, this is what we're going to do. We're not bringing in anybody we don't believe in. It has to be products that we currently use, would support. And want to recommend. And we've worked with 40 and partners at different lives and whatnot. And absolutely in your, that growth stage that you need that expertise and can't afford it.
00:47:51
Speaker
They'd be a wonderful fit into that. cool Yeah, yeah, for sure. They would. And it's also cool to hear how well things are going for object first. Cause you know, you guys know that we experimented with virtually every kind of doggone storage appliance you could ever experiment with.
00:48:06
Speaker
And, um you know, I think I feel like my fingers got mashed by the the darn object devices that we bought over the years ah that didn't work.
00:48:18
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I got to get your Joffrey on, you know, for once upon a time, starting to write us custom raid card drivers for Delp cards because we kept having weird issues with Seth knocking OSDs offline when we were doing single disk raid arrays on them. Yeah.
00:48:34
Speaker
Apparently, Ratmir figured it out. He did. He did. Well, honestly, it's a lot of the integrations, knowledge, and support. So when you look at object-first devices, if you really tear through it, you're like, well, that makes sense.
00:48:48
Speaker
But you've said that makes sense 97 times, and it's packaged for Veeam. But the big driver this past year was Veeam put out a storage API, and this has revolutionized everything. And object-first will recommend to people. it it It doesn't really fit well on the cloud service provider. You're not going to hook cloud tenants into it.
00:49:07
Speaker
um And maybe it's in the forecast. I don't yeah remember they, they, they were, they were tinkering with storage APIs for a long time. And I had a few, they had a few very specific APIs for certain, certain vendors and you could get certified and this and that, but it never seemed to be mainstream. Have they, have they made that mainstream now?
00:49:25
Speaker
Yes, it is. It is. Yeah. so So there's kind of two flavors of it now. There's the universal storage API for like the enterprise vendors of the world, like, you know, Dell for their data domains to know those enterprise plugins a little bit better. And then there's what they're calling the smart object storage API, which is kind of an additional API on top of S3 that vendors can choose to implement that gives some additional capacity and load balancing and performance benefits over just the regular APIs.
00:49:54
Speaker
You know, it's so funny. you know you you You mentioned this earlier in our conversation that ah that the maybe the the window of opportunity for what we were doing back then has passed. And I think ah think I really ah really sort of agree with you.
00:50:07
Speaker
Yet I sit here and I think about... Look at all these things that are possible now if we'd have just had some of them. of course, that was what we were working on. we were constantly We were constantly struggling and grinding to to build and make these things.
00:50:22
Speaker
And how many false starts did we have? ah Although we had we did have so some pretty darn good successes too ah in in building these in building these things. They're just nowhere near as easy and and transportable and universal and and and resilient like they are now, right?
00:50:44
Speaker
Well, here's one for you. This is going to make you, let's take you back to CEO days at Global Data Vault. I'm CIO. I walk and go, Will, it runs on Linux now. Veeam, no more Windows licensing.
00:50:55
Speaker
How happy would your world have been, you know? No more SQL licensing. No more SQL. It runs on Postgres. Oh, I kind of like SQL. but But it was... Yeah, we could have the SQL in our infrastructure, but not the SQL required for the um ri for the ah for each cloud host, right?
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah. that rebel Boy, oh, man. So our lu but we're waiting for a VMON so they can tell us V13. When does it come out? Because they've already said Linux is going to be a thing.
00:51:26
Speaker
but like is this lot Okay. So how can they be taking it? I mean, I know we got to end this podcast, but then this is a rhetorical question, but how can they be taking all that investment money from Microsoft and stabbing them in the back at the same time?
00:51:39
Speaker
If so, I don't know the specific numbers on it, but if I remember right, the majority of Azure actually runs on Linux, not Microsoft. Oh, there's Deming themselves. so to dot net It's still all based off of.NET. It's just newer.NET versions are cross-platform. So they're able to update, upgrade the code, change some calls, and make it work across multiple operating systems. That's called not eating your own dog food. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think Microsoft has a Linux division. Didn't they buy Red Hat or somebody?
00:52:07
Speaker
No, IBM bought Red Hat. IBM bought Red Hat. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, hey, I agree. it's It's the irony of, but, you know, I still go back to the joke of it's Microsoft Office 364 because when it goes down, it goes down.
00:52:21
Speaker
Like, and the world ends. It's funny. I've learned being an IT t support that while you might think things are mission critical, you screw with someone's phone or their email, the world ends.
00:52:31
Speaker
Like that is like the thing that has to work. Yep. Yeah. her Email. Hey, that this has been true for God. ah Half of my career in IT, t which is a very long time.
00:52:44
Speaker
Email is the killer app. Yeah, yeah, if it's not up and the best things we ever did was start and moving things to M365 because we weren't supporting exchange servers to keep our business moving.
00:52:54
Speaker
um But we're going to move into final thoughts here. And the other last one to will but Jonah, before you go, do you want to do any shout outs, wrap it up, whatever we're in the last few minutes here? What what do you have?
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, cyberfortress.com, if you need disaster recovery, if you need high performance backup as a service, you know, secondary or tertiary locations to spin your data up into, reach out to us.
00:53:20
Speaker
You know, we've got myself on staff, we've got multiple VMCEs, couple people about to go for their VMCAs, you know, very knowledgeable group with lots of expertise, not just in Veeam, but across several backup products.
00:53:34
Speaker
There you go, in different debt, I'll pay my own bills. We are Veeam-centric, we do everything Veeam-related. Doesn't matter what provider you have, we audit, we monitor, we're a fractional Veeam as a service, if you will. So we have VMCEs, VMCAs, and vanguards on staff.
00:53:49
Speaker
We can help you anything in the backup world. We're a dance partner. Do you need us to do it or help? We're here. Cloud providers, end users, whomever. No one's too big or small for us.
00:54:00
Speaker
Now let's kick it over to our special guest, Will Bassett. You're going to play us out, so to speak. So what are your ah closing thoughts here or shameless plugs, if you will? open flat All right, fair enough. shameless shameless are are are yeah Shameless plugs. and Fortium as an IT consulting group really complements the space that you guys are in um because as we've always observed for all these years, um the IT leadership really doesn't particularly want to, ah does it never gives the attention that backup and data protection
00:54:36
Speaker
ah needs. it's always It's always the redheaded stepchild in the and the IT world. and And that's where service providers like you are so complimentary because you bring so much professional capability and and and results to that piece of it. you you Your opportunity to partner with 4EM is fantastic. I know that they need they folks like you. And and likewise, um they they have a leadership team of veteran CIOs and CTOs and CISOs that are doing great work for our clients in the in the mid to mid to large enterprise space across virtually every industry.
00:55:13
Speaker
um And it's been super cool to watch those guys, ah good great growing business. And then and then where I am in my fractional role is ah ah as a fractional CFO, and I work with ah technology companies and and professional services businesses, um particularly SaaS businesses in the on the tech side.
00:55:37
Speaker
um But Seton Hill is ah is similarly a a growing professional services, CFO-oriented business. fractional interim project due diligence provider um with a a national footprint now and um and just an amazing team that I've had super opportunity to work with. So it's really been a cool cool ah ah blast blast from the past, ah even though even though you guys are a particularly distant and past, right? It hadn't been that long since we've seen you guys. And ah ah I'd love to connect when y'all are ya are around. and
00:56:13
Speaker
And let's go and be here sometime. Oh, thanks, man. I would love to catch up. And well, thank you all for listening. As always, catch us, like, comment, subscribe. We're going to play out with some cool music and we'll catch you the next time.
00:56:29
Speaker
Whether you're a seasoned solutionist or just starting out, the Rebel Depths podcast is a must listen. So join us. Comment, share and subscribe. Be part of the Rebel Depths.