#36 "Managed Services"

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. This is episode 36 of the workflow show. We are going to be talking to you today about managed services through Chesapeake systems and uh, my name's Jason Whetstone. I'm one of your co-hosts and I also have today with me Ben Kilburg. Hi there. Hi there. Been another one of our co-hosts and today we actually don't have our regular cohost Nichold with us. He's actually on holiday. We decided to kind of venture ahead and, Speaker 1 00:26 And do episode 36 on our own without him. So, um, today we have in the studio with us, uh, Louise Gable. Thanks for inviting me into the fold. Yeah. T tell us, tell us what you do for Chesapeake. Louise. Yes, I head up business development for Eastern and central U S so I like to think of myself as professional problem solver for folks who are ingesting, managing, delivering content and getting them the right technology tools to make that happen. Awesome. I started out on the support service side of things. I used to say where Ben sits and where Jason sits and was in the ensemble flow show. If only took me four years to garner an invitation and here I am. Yeah. Well we didn't, we didn't really do a lot of this. Um, Speaker 0 01:19 Yeah, a lot of the previous episodes were focused on having an external guests, like a, like a vendor partner gas store. I'm an industry expert or something like that in SME and um, Speaker 1 01:27 And now Tessa has grown enough to have in house. When we talked about, that was one of the things we talked about when we were like, you know, going to relaunch to do it for real with logos and like all that kind of stuff. Like awesome. I'm like, why don't we focus on some of our people and just talk to them about what they do. Yeah. So this is kind of a trip down memory lane because I used to be on the service side of things. What were you doing? I was doing support for newsroom software. So folks who put the news on the air, the systems that enable them to do that run downs, all that good stuff. Yes. Uh, too many, 2:30 AM wake up calls. So that's where you learned it. Yes. Too much XML, not enough people interaction. Gotcha. So if you haven't Speaker 0 02:14 Guests today we were talking about managed services and and uh, what kinds of services are available at just big systems, what managed services mean, why they would benefit you? Uh, how best to, uh, to interact with the managed services team and uh, what, you know, just kind of a rough idea of how a managed services agreement might be, uh, might be calculated in terms of an effort or cost to you. Um, so, uh, what are, you know, what, what are the, what are the benefits of doing this? Like, you know, what are, what are people, what are people getting out of it? Speaker 1 02:51 So why managed services that let us help take on the burden? Doesn't sound good. Sure. You've installed this whole huge system. You already had a job before you had this system. I'm sure your day was full and pretty sure San maintenance sand checkups are not in your job description and you don't have time for all of that. Uh, I always love asking people, what's your job title? How much of your time is spent actually doing the things in your job title and now if you've helped roll out this whole new system, there's all these new things to keep track of with that and where's the time going to come for that? And you didn't suddenly automatically become an expert in all of that. Uh, so really the managed services, I would flip that on what your creative is, be creative. If you're an editor, you're not a say an engineer, you probably don't want to be a say an engineer or an it person. Speaker 0 03:48 Yep. What about, um, what about in those, in those organizations that do have some technical resources? I mean they might have a, I mean, you know, almost every organization has an it team and sometimes those people manage the, the storage environment and things like that. Sometimes it's a completely separate thing, but like what, what would be the benefit to a, to an organization that already has like a fairly technical team of people? It's the Speaker 1 04:11 Tying everything together. You have your experts in all of the different pieces. It's unlikely a client has an expert in all of the pieces because they haven't had all of the pieces before. They haven't had this workflow before. And often Chesapeake has been involved in designing and deploying that workflow. So, Speaker 0 04:33 So the client does have some technical resources, but you know, maybe they're not, uh, anyone listening to this can can attest to the fact that like all of the technical parts of their sand, their ma'am, they're transcoding, you know, those are kind of niche things that are really specific to, Speaker 1 04:50 And their existing resources are specialized for a reason. Right? In each of those. And I think Jessica can fill the space in between. Speaker 2 04:58 Absolutely. And I think that cert, that's a role we serve on a regular basis is that we speak it and we speak creative. So often we're brought in under this role to kind of translate between the two teams to explain the points of view for each team so that they understand what somebody else might be asking for. Right. Speaker 1 05:18 And it's also a factor of, if you want to say 30,000 foot versus in the trenches, but just if you have subject matter experts and they know this is the archive system or this is the media management system, these are the switches. But for most of the end users, they don't care about all of that. Speaker 0 05:39 They want to know what works, do their job. That's right. Yeah. They care about that hard drive icon on their desktop and that works and it's fast enough. Speaker 1 05:47 And so as I always am amused when people get tripped up by workflow and using that term, it doesn't have to be complicated. Everyone has a workflow whether or not you think of it in those lofty terms. And often the folks that have the specialized technical knowledge are not as well versed in the overall workflow. And then thus you get gaps. Speaker 0 06:12 Absolutely. So, so, so Chesapeake's managed services are really there to sort of fill those gaps and be, you know, that, that, that partner that's going to fill in those spaces. So like specifically what kinds of services are we talking about Speaker 1 06:27 That proactive and reactive? I always like to refer to us as the Delta force of media workflow engineers. Speaker 0 06:37 I, I'm, I love being a member of the Delta force Speaker 1 06:40 In and out. Fix your problem. Maybe you didn't even know we were there. Especially with our new monitoring capabilities. We started fixing problems before clients are aware they might have a problem. Speaker 0 06:51 Yeah, monitoring is something we're actually going to get into. In the next segment of the show. We're going to be talking to Marina Blandino, our manager of professional services and Brian Summa, our one of our senior systems engineers about what that looks like. But for now, Speaker 1 07:08 Uh, just go ahead and services. What do we offer? What do we do? Have certainly break fix on, if you want to call it a basic tier one level, the server isn't on, it's not doing the things it's supposed to do. I'm supposed to have a file here. I don't have a file here. Uh, so certainly all of those things and many technical pieces, many steps for jobs to get done these days and lots of potential places for breakdowns to happen of being on top of that. Hopping in when those things happen. Speaker 0 07:41 So you just mentioned about how, you know I have, I'm supposed to have a file here. I don't have a file here. Like so what about support with your storage vendor? Like you know, why isn't it enough? Why isn't that enough? Speaker 1 07:54 Yeah. So that gets back into our subject matter experts and you've probably got your storage vendor, your archive vendor, your media asset management vendor, maybe a transcoding vendor and they are experts in their product and their piece of it, but they probably aren't experts in the other product or how they all interact and how their product is deployed in a certain customer's environment. Uh, that so many of these systems are bespoke and are custom configured. I was interacting with other systems. Yes. I always like to talk about the bucket of Legos that you buy a media asset management system. You buy a transcoding platform, you're really buying a bucket of Legos that can do any number of things. And we sell the same platforms to corporations, sports teams, broadcasters, obviously organizations. Yeah, they look very different for how each of those organizations use them. And getting that set up is the key part of hows. Yes, it can do all these things. What do you need it to do? Speaker 0 09:00 Example, if I have the, I should have the file, I don't have the file. Was the file supposed to be put there by your media asset management platform? Maybe there's a problem with that, you know as the storage vendor going to know like you know where to look for that? No. If it is right. And if it is the problem with, if it is a problem with the ma'am then then what? Then you go to the, you go to the man vendor with in hope that your support contract is update with them and everything. So yeah, Speaker 1 09:24 And that's time folks don't have to run around. Find the phone number, the email, who am I supposed to call? Who's responsible for what? And then if you call them, Oh not it, that's so unhelpful. Right. And now folks can just call Jessa and we sorted out Speaker 0 09:42 And it's the one neck to hug. Exactly the one throat to choke now the one neck to hug. Thank you. Right? Yeah. So we can holistically look and we'll pull the logs and all of these things and say, who is to blame? It turns out it's a port on your switch. We needed your transceiver, right? Storage vendor might be able to tell you that, but not your man guy. Speaker 1 10:06 And just in troubleshooting, those kinds of things because so many times it's the interaction between different systems and the kinds of things that can happen in interactions of these systems. We at Chesapeake currently support dozens, I think 50 plus environments on an ongoing basis. And many folks have the same systems. Certainly there are a few predominant nonlinear editors. So many folks use the same one. So we see can see patterns and similar things in that. And chances are we have configured X, nonlinear editor with Y storage Speaker 0 10:43 Or ma'am or transcoder or what, Speaker 1 10:45 And seeing, Oh, this is what can happen with that. And having just that body of knowledge and frame of reference, uh, just the variety and the exposure, uh, across so many different systems and that's benefited our team in building their knowledge. And then anyone who signs up with managed services with Chesa has access to that whole treasure trove of knowledge and experience and other people tripped and fell. So now you don't have to, Speaker 0 11:14 Right. Right. Or, or maybe they'll, maybe we'll be able to get you right back up after your trip and fall because we've seen this trip and fall before and we're gonna, you know, do whatever we can to minimize the impact. Right. Cause everybody's going to have trips and falls with the ways of support so we can route you right around that error. Right. We might have been able to catch you before you hit the ground. Uh, so, um, let's talk a little bit about, uh, what, what kinds of options do we have with the managed services agreement with Chesapeake? Like, you know, is it, is it like, you know, does the whole environment have to be supported? Can we support parts of the environment? Is it only things that we sold? Like what, you know, Speaker 1 11:53 All of the above. Speaker 0 11:54 We, it is certainly common that we continue to support on an ongoing basis. Environments that we deployed. Again, you buy your bucket of Legos, you talk to us, what kind of a castle do I want? We designed the blueprint, we build the castle for you, we help you move into the castle, then we defend the castle going forward. Uh, that's fairly common. We know everything in your environment. We're supporting that. Also, increasingly folks come to us with existing environments. Almost no one is a Greenfield these days. Right? Uh, and especially as systems get more complex and you're integrating maybe business process systems or work order systems, other financial systems point of sale, more things come into the media supply chain and have to interact that it's very unlikely everything will be changing all at once. So we definitely come into existing environments. It could be one small piece. Speaker 0 12:50 Maybe we have experience with their archive piece or with their man piece and spreading out from there of being able to support that. Yes. So we certainly come in and can help level set on things. We have various levels of offerings, service level agreements, recognizing we work with the 24 seven international broadcasters to show goes on at this time. No wiggle room with that. That was going to be my next question. So like, talk a little bit about the different, um, like what are the different options in terms of like, you know, well we are a, you know, we're a news organization, we're producing content 24, seven, we always need to be up. We can't be down. Um, so we have engineers you Speaker 1 13:34 Cover you, right. So how, I was going to say that's definitely an advantage. I was just thinking back to my days of being the on call engineer and I've left that life behind, which is very glorious. So it's no longer me getting the calls at 2:00 AM. What were some of your worst and best calls? Like when did you feel effective and when was it just an absolute crap? Not effective? Was getting the on-call call when I was driving through a pounding rain thunderstorm to get to the next job. Uh, that was not fun. Um, yeah, Speaker 0 14:07 I've have been in the support area, have always had to deal with a support issue while we're talking. Speaker 1 14:14 So one thing I like that Chessa does differently from my, my on call experiences that is very smart that I hadn't thought about is how often folks rotate through the on call rotation. So when I was on call, it was a week on and it was one week every two months. And now I believe that we rotate just about every day. There's a the frontline person overnight. Uh, so one you're not getting burned out if there's calls every night, that week at 3:00 AM as well as keeping your skills sharp because I certainly know, Oh, it's been two months since I was on call the last time I saw this. Oh, run up the gears again, shake off the dust or there's a new version of firmware. Speaker 0 15:00 No, everything's different. So surprise. And I actually personally tend to find that the, that the sort of daily rotation works better. It's a little bit, um, maybe more difficult to plan things like out of office time, like vacations and stuff like that because that's the second thing that you have to check other than like, is this a good time to go on vacation? Um, but uh, other than that it's, yeah, it works out really well. And um, and do you want to talk about the different levels of escalation? Speaker 1 15:28 Yeah, and I was just thinking now that Chessa is officially by coastal as of a few years ago, we have coverage through East coast as well as West coast business hours, um, for live folks in the office before things which more to the oncall and then certainly different levels around response times and guaranteed response times. Uh, that if you are that enterprise broadcaster, news organization, the news goes on at this time of one hour response times, we will get back to you. Uh, we will be onsite in four hours, I think it is. Definitely same day if need be. We've scaled up our team and our processes to make that possible. I love telling folks when we talk about response times and, and with our online portal and ticketing system and what we've built to the ring ups if rollover, if someone doesn't answer. So we've got our on call tech and if no one responds within 10 or 15 minutes and it goes up the chain, if no one responds within 50 minutes, it's on our CEO's desk. Right? A nightstand? Yes. Yes. In his ear. And our service management is very proud that nothing has ever gotten to the CEO and only one, maybe two calls have made it to service management at about the half hour Mark. So that's definitely a, they make sure that I'm aware of that, that I can, uh, toot their horn, so to speak. Speaker 0 17:03 Very good. In addition to sort of this fast response time situations, we also have a little bit more of a, an environment where maybe there's not timely like news deliveries and things like that. Maybe we can wait 24 hours or something like that. Speaker 1 17:16 Yes. And you still have complex enough systems that you merit working with Chesapeake systems for your media supply chain setup. And your video post production operations, but you don't have the volume of content to pay for enterprise level. Uh, as we all know, these things get complicated very quickly. Absolutely. And even on a small scale, uh, so now that's a big thing. We've been able to kind of expand in offering. If you can't afford 24, seven enterprise level, but you still have access to us and you're willing to wait until during business hours, then at a more affordable price point you still have access to our team. Especially because we don't do any sort of hours, buckets of hours anymore. I don't know if we've talked about that. Speaker 0 18:07 We didn't really talk about that. So, uh, yeah. How is, how is the, how's the cost calculated? The cost. The cost to the client. Yeah. Cause that's been a Speaker 1 18:14 Major paradigm that people have, you know, give me a bucket of hours, you know, I'll call you when I need you. That's been the classic. Speaker 0 18:22 We always find with that, right, that people hoard their hours that they never call cause they're just waiting for a disaster. And guess what, when you think about a disaster, a disaster comes. So don't do that. Be proactive. Right? Speaker 1 18:34 Right. And in hoarding their hours. Okay. And then they would call it an emergency and okay, we haven't talked to you in two years. We're not in a position to help you because we have no idea what's going on in your shop. Maybe you added workstations, maybe you added a whole new storage array. We've never seen that. How are we going to be able to troubleshoot in a timely manner? So that really leads to how we came to this current managed services set up Speaker 0 19:02 For the sort of like remote visits come in where we have an engineer come, you know, quarterly or whatever the arrangement is on site and take a look at, put eyes on everything, make sure everything's working, make sure, like, you know, if there have been any changes that we've documented them so we know about them. Speaker 1 19:16 Yes. The only way to truly be reactive is to be proactive. That is our mantra so that we avoid those hair on fire moments in the first place. We're regularly in touch, uh, that we have remote check-ins monthly or more often. For some folks we have periodic on-sites. Again, the different levels. For some folks it's twice a month. For some folks it's twice a year, uh, that we are regularly in contact with you. We know when your busy season is, we work with a ton of sports teams, so we know when the off season is, we know when the playoffs are happening and can change anything. Then, uh, all those kinds of things so that we're in touch, we're really partners and we can head off, no surprises, avoid surprises and those Speaker 0 20:04 As few as possible anyway, fires as quick as possible. Great. So, you know, what does it cost? What's the, how do you calculate, you know, when we talked about the, you know, we, we look at hours of effort. Like what, what's the effort? Speaker 1 20:18 Yeah. So what are we talking about in terms of dollars and cents? Many folks are familiar with, Oh, this is my hourly rate. Uh, even, you know, we've probably gone to the Apple store. Oh, my computer is out of warranty. My applicator's gone. I need this fixed. Okay. It's going to be what, one 5,200 bucks an hour Speaker 0 20:37 Or a flat fee of just sending the sucker out for a grand and get everything replaced. Speaker 1 20:41 Yeah. So folks are familiar with that paradigm, but this scope and it's annual or it's quarterly, how do I conceptualize that? Uh, so back to we're really an extension of your team. We're a partner. There's a spot for us on your org chart and instead of hiring someone, an individual person, you are hiring Chesapeake systems, uh, newsflash, engineers and it people are expensive. Speaker 2 21:11 Yeah. Right? And we've looked at some of those comparables, right? We've looked and we've seen, you know, if your engineer's going to cost you $80,000 a year plus healthcare plus vacation time. Exactly. What if we can give you a team, like Louise said, the Delta force of the media supply chain. And what if they come at half that price or even less, right? Speaker 1 21:33 Or you for a single head count, what you would have to budget for a single head count. You have access to our team of over a dozen folks. Right? And the skill sets available among those dozen folks versus what you're one person could conceivably learn and maintain as their knowledge base and their expertise. Speaker 0 21:56 We should also take a second and talk about what the talent pool looks like currently for, for, you know, being being an engineer to support an environment with the Sans and Adobe premier or whatever you're using. And, and ma'am and like, you know, Speaker 1 22:12 Broadcast technology has really merged into, it collapsed that broadcast used to be very specialized hardware and all these specific boxes and now all of those special boxes have collapsed into it gear, right? But needing to understand content, creative content workflows for it gear. And I'm involved with CMT, the society of motion picture and television engineers and they're big on education and that's a huge focus of for the next generation. And you know, education college courses aren't fast enough for the rate of innovation and change in the industry. Have to churn out people who are versed in this stuff and have the, the knowledge and the skills and the experience to deal with all of these systems, Speaker 0 23:01 Right? So sometimes making a new hire to manage a system like this, as you know, it might not be feasible, like Ben said, you know, with, with, with, with the cost of having to bring someone in with those skills and that experience, you know, it, it might end up being better overall for your organization to, to partner up with us. Speaker 1 23:19 Especially if a new initiative launches, maybe there's a partnership. Suddenly there's money behind this, okay, you've got to deliver this content. Here's the deadline. We've got all our partnership on our marketing plan rolled out, and then the technology people are left. How do I do this? And even if even if they have the money to the bodies and scaling up the systems on quick turn of things that we have the team we're ready to go. Speaker 0 23:48 Yep. Yeah. And often the tech is similar to what it is supporting for maybe the central infrastructure, but it's a little bit different, right? Everything is built a little bit around sequential data, not specifically I ops, right? The media workflows are always a little bit different. We're not talking about, um, snapshots regularly and tiny files. We're talking about really big files and we need to figure out how to put those places that are, um, cost effective to, how was it them really, really big files that need to be accessed very quickly if they aren't going to change. You know, so it's a, it's a lot of different considerations that I think we're not, we, you know, we don't see in this sort of it generalist space. It's not a bus. It's not a Hugo, it's a sports car. Right. Um, the other thing to mention too is that like the educational aspect of, of, of really what the relationship, so that's something that we also do is we like to help people. We like to educate people and help, you know, if, if you're really at the end of the day, interested in doing as much as you can on your team, you know, we can help you with that. Speaker 1 24:52 I'm not just going to date you, we're going to marry you. Make sure your kids go to college. Speaker 0 24:57 Exactly. Yeah. I liked that cause we kinda like, yeah, of course. Speaker 1 25:08 But that is too, we're an extension of your team. We're invested and we work with really fascinating people that produce really stunning content. That's interesting. Speaker 0 25:20 Great. So, uh, big environments, small environments, like massive environments. Like what kinds of environments do we support? Like lots of workstations only, you know, is there a minimum? Not really. All of the above. Yeah. Speaker 1 25:36 And that is the great thing about how we scope these out because it is on a scope and what is the effort to support this environment, which is a great thing about having been doing these things for a decade. We have a decade of data to look back of what does it take to support these kinds of environments in this holistic manner. Um, that is something we're very uniquely positioned to have a perspective on that and have experience with that. And okay, you have this many workstations, you have this many storage rays if you have an archive or not, if you have remote users, if you have multiple offices, all of these things play into that scope and what it takes to support a, whether there's remote access into your environment. We have a number of customers in secure facilities who don't have internet access to their machines and anything we do, we have to go onsite. We can definitely do that. We just need to know that going in and Speaker 0 26:37 Price accordingly. Price accordingly. Exactly. Um, I'm a Googler and if I didn't have access to the internet, uh, it would be tough. It would be tough. Um, so, uh, what, why don't we, why don't we just kind of talk about like what you're seeing in terms of when you talk to your customers that have that either, um, you know, have a, have a managed services agreement with us or uh, are, are looking into it and are curious about it. So what are they asking you for? Maybe things that like, um, either we, you know, are doing and could be doing better. Maybe there are things that we're not doing yet, um, that we're looking into. Just talk about that a little bit. Like what, what are people asking you for? Speaker 1 27:21 Yes. It's surprisingly prosaic. People are not asking for the moon. They want to get home on time and not be pulling all nighters to make deadlines. It's really not rocket science. They want things to work. And that's a big goal of how we have set all of this up with the proactive to keep things humming along, to avoid those hair on fire moments. Uh, I was like the, I think it's the Vince Lombardi quote about football being a game of fundamentals and blocking and tackling. And it's really not more complicated than that. Uh, with so much of this, it's really not more complicated. Systems just need to work well, be designed and set up together well. Speaker 0 27:59 Right? That's like your car, right? You've got to take it in, you've got to get the oil changed, you gotta rotate the tires, you need new tires. You don't do any of that. You don't keep your car on the road. Same thing, right? Your body, your body, your body with your teeth, with your media as well. That's right. With your media supply chain. Speaker 1 28:18 Yeah. So we're well equipped to do all of those basics. And on top of that, again, this wealth of knowledge we have and long tenured folks is really an asset. I always tell people, you have access to the Chesa brain trust. Yes, we do break fix. Yes we do maintenance. We also are your strategic partner. We are media supply chain, workflow experts. What do you want to know? Right? We are an extension of your team, uh, because likely you've got day to day deliverables. You don't have time to look at what's the next big thing. Speaker 0 28:54 But that, I like what you just said about the IX. We are an extension of your team because I do feel that way, um, as, as somebody who, you know, works on projects and in, you know, and in the support area, um, you know, I do feel like, like we are an extension of the team regardless of how technical or nontechnical that team might be. I mean, we work with so many different kinds of organizations. Sometimes they have, sometimes our direct client that we were talking to is a very technical person. Sometimes they're not such a technical person and they may not even have technical resources within their organization that they can tap into. And that's what we are. So that's a really interesting way that you know, that we work with so many different types of organizations and people, which I always found really fascinating. And that's one of the things we love about it, right? Because we get a view into these other organizations how they work and it really informs how we work both as a team and to help everybody in our community, which is great. All right, well why don't we go to the next section of our program with Marina and Brian talking about the sort of technical aspects of a managed services agreement. Speaker 0 30:01 So, uh, I think we're going to start off with Marina because she is the manager of professional services and she can sort of, um, talk through like, you know, what do you get with managed services? What are the managed services? Speaker 3 30:16 So in terms of like the sales perspective, you get three tiers. You have your standard professional and enterprise. So in terms of what you want your response time to be, what you would like in terms of onsite visits, in terms of, you know, do you need 24 seven support or do you need nine to five we tailor to all different organizations because not everybody needs 24, seven. Um, a lot of what the team does is that we are just a knowledge bank of so many different hardware and software products, Speaker 0 30:45 Right? So we're not just supporting one technology, one, one vendor, you know, I mean just think about all of the different types of storage that we sell just alone, just storage. So you've got your sands and your NAZA is and your cloud storage, your on prem cloud and all that kind of stuff. So, Speaker 3 31:03 And that's where, you know, our support comes in hand where yes, we do always encourage that you get the vendor support, but their SLA response times aren't great. You're not always going to get the answer. And honestly, most people don't want to learn the technology. Um, and that's one of the hardest parts is you have so much technology in your environment. You can either pay for somebody to come and learn everything in there, but still not actually have all the knowledge. Or you can purchase a support agreement with Chesapeake and will learn the product for you whether we know it offhand or if we learn it on the go, we're going to learn it so we can support it to the T to the highest here. Speaker 0 31:43 So you're, what I hear you saying Marina, is that we don't necessarily only support solutions that we sell. Speaker 3 31:50 Oh no, of course not. The whole point is that we love to learn and that is the team dynamic and aspect of our culture is that no matter what product we get in our environment, we're going to learn it. We're going to help you support it and we're going to learn the best practices so that the information we provide to you is the highest tier, you know? And of course there's always going to be an escalation to the product vendor. Well, we got to get armies from them. That's, this is the reality. But in terms of just being able to support the product, we actually ended up learning more about the product and the product owners and owners themselves. And that is something that's huge across its support team and product team as well. So that knowledge bank is disseminated between all of us. It's not just one person knows how to do this. We all learn how to do it together. And that's where swarming comes in very handing and swarming is think of me like the queen bee and then I have all my little bees that follow me. And my whole purpose is to make sure that they have the knowledge to support the client environment. So as a queen bee, I make sure that everything that they need to know is in their knowledge bank, whether it's training, documentation, or even getting the hardware on site for us to troubleshoot in play with. So and dissemination of knowledge Speaker 2 33:04 There that that needs to occur within the organization to make sure that it's not maybe just one individual or you know, a one particular engineer supporting an entire client's environment. Right? Speaker 3 33:16 Oh yeah, of course. And of course there's always that one person who's super into, you know, windows servers and they are all about politics and ACS and they understand permissions from front end. But even with that knowledge, they do have a broad understanding of everything else. And if they don't have that knowledge firsthand, there's another engineer, another technician that can help them with that. Speaker 2 33:37 Right? It's not this kind of like, well that's not really my bag. So you got somebody else more of a, let's all learn this together, you know, and maybe, and maybe also teach the client something as well. And as I understand that, that's one of the biggest principles of swarming is that you've got kind of a lead engineer who's more senior, who's kind of front guard, right? Who's making sure that when the client calls in or puts a support ticket in through the portal, that I'm there to answer first and hopefully resolve any issues that they can. And then if they need to call somebody else in to help them or hand it off to another engineer, that's what they do, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's not just, you know, I call the support number and it rings right through to Brian's cell phone right Speaker 3 34:21 There. Yeah. There, there is our, what we call our swarm lead or support analyst who is that first level or first line of support, who gather all the information, who will get everything that they need to their resolve at first, you know, at firsthand or to, you know, escalate it. But the whole point of that is so that they're actually growing their knowledge and that is the quickest way to learn new technology. Um, if you just hand it off and you know, don't try for yourself, you're never going to learn. So a lot of what we do is, you know, training outside and you know, we do get to schedule that, but it's also, you know, training on the go on the fly. Speaker 2 34:59 Yep. So we keep up with a lot of vendor training, but we, and we schedule that and make sure to proactively make sure the engineers stay on top of their game. You know, whenever there's an update to say store next file system, what's new, what's different, what do we have to watch out for? Make sure that we're on top of all of those details where we have to cross the T's and dot the I's. Speaker 3 35:20 Yes. And also, you know, being aware of what bugs are out there, what patch updates, making sure that our clients are always, you know, up to date for what's necessary. You know, they might really some minor point re release, but that doesn't mean it's going to fix any issues. It's literally, Oh there's this aesthetic that you know, it doesn't work. So we really do have to evaluate, evaluate everything so that we can see, you know, what's going to maintain that uptime that clients are looking for. Because that's the most important part of our business is making sure that you're up all the time. Speaker 2 35:52 Do you see that as a big benefit to clients? Because we've got, I don't know how many of our support clients now, 40 ish, something like that. About 50 plus. Okay. So we're in a large number of environments. So we get to see the bugs as they come in. So hopefully we're able to say, yeah, don't update to that. Right, because that's just gonna. Um, cause you much agita and grief, so, Speaker 0 36:17 Right. You know, you've got Apple releasing new versions of their operating system pretty much every year and every time that happens there's a whole list of like, Oh, hold on a second. You know, you might want that new dark mode or whatever it is, but not, you know, not just yet. There's some, there's some software developers that need to catch up and make sure that they're, you know, a hundred percent compatible with your environment because you know, Speaker 3 36:42 You need to be up and you need to get your work done. That's really the most important thing. Right. And that's the one thing is testing is very important to us is the fact that if you do upgrade, if you do make those minor point release updates, you don't know what can break and hear. What we could do in support is actually test that before we deploy it. I tell our clients all the time, you know, when Apple releases a new one, probably don't update immediately. Especially if you're in a San environment, NAS environments, it's a little bit more flexible, but the reality is you should always wait. Even I don't want to upgrade immediately because if I can't support you, then the whole chain just starts to go downhill. Speaker 0 37:21 What about, uh, so let's, let's just throw a hypothetical scenario out there. I mean, I've got in my environment, I've got storage. Maybe I've got a sand. Uh, let's just say I have a San and let's say I have a digital asset management system. Uh, ma'am, uh, and I don't have an archive platform and Apple releases a new iOS and all my editors are coming to me saying, Hey, you know, when can we get that? When can we get the new thing? Or maybe there's an update to premier or something like that. Hey, when can we get that? When can we have that? Like, it's got this new feature that we all absolutely have to have. It's going to save us tons of time, right? This is, we hear this all the time, right? So, uh, you know, someone does a quick check on all of those things and they all seem to be compatible with the new iOS. So good, right? We're good to go, right? Speaker 3 37:59 No, maybe, maybe not. So when that happens, it's definitely a conversation and I always encourage our clients, you know, when end users start reaching out and saying, Hey, I want this now. Well let's have a conversation. Let's talk about it. Because the reality is, yes, we all want what's new and shiny, but what's new and shiny may disrupt your asset management system. It may disconnect you from the storage. It'll cause more problems than it actually does resolve anything. So yes, there might be an amazing new feature in Adobe that everybody's waiting for. What is that feature worth? Losing connectivity to the sand where you write to or to your asset system where you in just all your assets. Right? So, and you'll get it. Just be a little patient. Yeah. Right. And for all, you know, if we have that conversation with your account manager, with myself, with an engineer, you may find out that yeah, everything's good to go, like, let's go. Speaker 3 38:51 But if you do it on your own, then we're going into a reactionary and we want to avoid those reactionary situations. Right. So big theme I'm hearing here, which is that, uh, you know, the, the opportunity of having managed services hosted through an integrator like Chesapeake systems really gives, it gives us the opportunity to see the client's environment holistically and, and not just focus on one particular technology or solution. Uh, we, we can really focus on how they all work together, which is really to the end user. That's what they're, that's what they bought the solutions for. That's what they're using them for because they work together in a certain way. And that's what's what integration is. Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth. That's why you come to an integrator. Right, right. And you know, with us as an integrator, as us, as your support, you know, as we are the responsible for your support and supporting your environment. Speaker 3 39:43 If you just have vendor contracts, I guarantee because it's happened to us, they'll start pointing fingers at each other. You can do an update for one thing and all of a sudden it breaks something else. All of a sudden you reach out to that vendor, they'll tell you, no, it's not mine. It's not my issue. It's this vendor's issue. I'm, I'm about to point my finger at Brian just because I haven't heard from him yet because I don't think anybody's really like directed any questions to him. Uh, what have you seen in terms of, you know, maybe needs for more of an integrated support solution? Um, in an organization? Speaker 4 40:14 Um, I mean for the most part I've been doing this, um, I guess 15 plus years now and when we first started out, everything was sort of, um, Kumar compartmentalize in the sense that you either had an all Apple solution or you had an all avid solution. And so communicating with the vendor was pretty much the norm on account of the fact that it behooved you to have these sort of, um, singular technology environments because then you had one person to blame. Um, the fact is is that as time has kind of gone on it, you know, it turns out that not everyone can do everything equally as well as far as these technologies. And so in the revolution that has become computers in broadcast and computers in creative, you know, graphical environments, um, it becomes a little muddy in the sense that, um, yes, you know, Adobe does X, Y, and Z, uh, and quantum does Q, R and S, but then you've got this gap in between. Speaker 4 41:31 So you then fill that with a bunch of like little knickknacks or things like, uh, asset managers that proport to work with both solutions. But at the end of the day, while they might work with both solutions, there's also five other solutions that they purport to work with. And so you have to wonder like how well it all fits together. And account of, um, you know, if the industry is leaning towards a particular technology, then more R and D effort is put into that technology. However, the world keeps turning and these other technologies may be in Vogue six months, six years later, and then they say, Oh, well we support that, but how well do they support it? So, um, in the community, there's this often, this notion that you can't prove a negative, um, meaning that, you know, how do you prepare for something until it happens? Speaker 4 42:25 How do you, how, you know, when you write software, you write it to do a certain function. If there's an unexpected consequence of that function exception and exception to the rule, um, you're, you didn't write or plan for that. So none of your training material that you provided the client or the end user is going to specify these hypothetical's, none of the, you know, knowledge based articles. You can't write a knowledge base article on a something until you know, it's an issue. Right. So, um, in the sense that, you know, when you have someone like ourselves in the midst of everybody, although it's not great for the first person to have that problem, it's nice to know that everybody else who has something similar is going to benefit from that first person. Um, and oftentimes, um, you know, we're the ones who are bringing it to the attention of the development teams on the individual platforms. Speaker 0 43:29 So we in a sense are learning, we are teaching each other, we're teaching our clients and we're also in a sense educating some of our vendors, some of our vendor partners that we work with on a regular basis that we are yeah. That we are working with. So it sounds like it's a great opportunity to, to share knowledge and share experiences and share, uh, you know, stories. So, so how do we do that? Right? So it's um, Oh, I found a bug. You're going to submit that to the vendor, right? Um, or there's a feature request, Hey, this one client had this great idea. Wouldn't it be great if, and so we can as a team filter that information through us, back to the vendor and we've had some really great success stories with our vendors in terms of getting new features for our clients. Oh, and by the way, you know, X, Y and Z a, B and C clients are also having this issue or, or they're seeing a need for this feature. Um, so this isn't just an isolated use case. It's, it's actually something that we're finding is, you know, it's prevalent Speaker 4 44:32 And there's also the, there's a certain benefit too with when you have a system that is not working and you have a system that is working, you can then do an apples to apples comparison and say, okay, well what is different about these two systems? We have one that is working when it is not working. And then you can start to break it down and become very microscopic on how you look at it. Kind of say, okay, well this, this is, these are all the differences between these two systems. And the systems can be something as small as a desktop. And it can be something as grand as a full on network storage environment with asset management and deliverables to a particular external cloud source. And the more that we work with clients and clients work with us, the more likely we will have the knowledge to know or the ability to compare, you know, uh, a broken system with a non broken system and arrive at the solution much quicker often than the, even sometimes, like you said, the vendors will because, uh, the vendors just really and rightfully so, focus on their software or their hardware solution, their solution. Speaker 4 45:52 And if it comes down to it, just like everybody else in this world, they have limited resources, they may have to throw up the white flag and say, we can't continue to troubleshoot this problem because, um, it's requiring, you know, resources that we don't have Speaker 3 46:09 And, and maybe, uh, maybe a broader look at the environment to see what else is at play here. Absolutely. So, um, so I hear, uh, well let's just back to the fact of what you stated earlier is that they say they can integrate with all these different systems, but it's okay. How far does your troubleshooting go in that integration? Right? How much are you actually gonna really support what you're saying you do integrate with? And is the anchor degration just a one way street where it's like once it starts to talk to that and it doesn't work, that's no longer ours. Speaker 4 46:40 Well, a lot of, yeah. And a lot of integrations, and this is my opinion. Um, and I'm sure that vendors would be upset when they hear this, but I think a lot of integrations really is, Hey, we tried it and it worked. So it's integrated. There is, Speaker 3 46:58 But there's this one feature, this one use case that was, that the integration was developed for, right. And now we're going to productize it and make it available to other, to other clients, which is, you know, it's perfectly fine, but it may not work the same way for everyone. Speaker 4 47:12 Right. Yeah. I mean, and that's the whole thing is that yeah, there's, there are things like to be able to say this piece of software works for this other piece of software or this file system or this fundamental thing. Unfortunately, um, a lot of times it's like, it worked. It's continued to work. We haven't had to modify our code to make it work and they haven't had to modify their code to make it work. So it seems to work. We're integrated. And then you find out like, Oh yes, you are integrated, but under this particular circumstance, um, and then once you throw the slightest bit of chaos into that equation, then you start having problems and it's like, well, it's always worked before. And, and then you find out like, okay, like the fact, or sometimes you have one way integration, which is you have one company saying, we work with this other piece of software. Speaker 4 48:05 However, that other piece of software is not reciprocating and saying, yeah, we work with this other piece of software. And then this one way integration, you realize this is all, you know, your victim. Uh, or that the software that says that they integrate with this other piece of software, they can fall victim, they can fall victim to basically a development cycle, um, that is out of their control. And there may be a gap in time when, um, it just, you know, yes it works, but once you go to upgrade this other version, we still have to now, I don't know, reverse engineer what changes they might a been cause we're not actually communicating. Um, and it's very muddy world for sure. Right. Speaker 3 48:53 What the benefits of managed services are to customer qualifying compatibility. We just heard Brian talk about that. Um, being able to react to support needs. Uh, so react sounds like a bad word, but that is a big part of what we do is reacting to, Hey, this isn't working. Can you take a look? What about proactively, uh, being involved in some of these, uh, environments. So proactively, you know, we, we reached out to all the clients. We make sure that they're up to date. I chat with every client monthly, quarterly, weekly, um, on an ongoing basis to make sure that, you know, everything's up and running in their environment, they're happy with the services and then, you know, on the support side or where, you know, talking about, you know, what's the real time uptime, it comes down to our monitoring system, which Brian had developed for us. Speaker 3 49:41 And we'll get into that in a little bit. Yeah. Where, you know, we're able to get real time alerts so that we're able to proactively reactively address situations. You know, if a drive fails or if a system goes down, you know, we're alerted in our PagerDuty system where our support analyst is notified so that we can go and proactively inform the client that there may be an issue. So you mentioned PagerDuty, that implies some sort of an on call paging system. Talk about that a little bit. So, depending on your SLA choice, um, which, you know, discuss with your colleagues, your service level agreement or software licensing agreement, no your service level agreement or your master services agreement or our MSA, which a lot of our legacy clients know it as is, you know, what your response time and also you know, what you get in terms of like if something goes down and you have a standard contract between nine and five, you'll be notified the next business day just according to your contract itself. Um, but we will, you know, we'll always keep up to date and informed on what your environment's looking like. Not every client has, you know, um, a monitoring system. Smaller clients normally don't, just because it's not valuable for their infrastructure. We always encourage it regardless of the fact, um, cause real time monitoring, make sure that we can guarantee that you do have a significant uptime. I can't say we've, it's a hundred percent. That's unrealistic. Nothing can stay up 100% of the time. Real, Speaker 0 51:05 Real time monitoring being, uh, so we have a server within the client's walls and they're connected to their, you know, their network that can say these are all of the systems that should be up and running and they should be working efficiently and when they're not, what happens. Speaker 3 51:22 So then they're not, they go into our PagerDuty system, which is our oncall system, which we have during regular business hours and after hours as well. So when an issue happens within your environment and alerts our monitoring system, it'll send an alert to PagerDuty, which will notify the support analyst. So it's an automated notification system? Correct. Okay, great. And that both works for the monitoring system and email alerts. So if there is an issue that comes in during business hours or after hours and you know, when it comes down to your service level agreement, um, it'll know if I, the on-call staff during business hours or after hours. Speaker 0 51:56 Cool. Brian, um, you want to talk a little bit about how that works on the back end, what kind of information we're capturing there in terms of monitoring and you know, what the time series data looks like and all that. Speaker 4 52:08 Sure. So what it is is ah, in my back bedroom I raise these little trolls, uh, that uh, basically live off of, um, you know, fairy dust and wow. Speaker 3 52:22 The master tinker, tinker. Speaker 4 52:25 Yeah, no. Um, so, uh, as most people who know anything about technology is that, um, uh, each system typically has some sort of like passive alert that it can push to you. Meaning like if I have a raid, if I plug in some email SMTP settings, if there is a problem such as a fail dry of a failed controller or something like that, it will then send an alert so that, uh, if I am not in physical proximity to the device to hear an audible alarm or see a visual signal such as a red light or something like that, I'll know that, Hey, there's something that needs to be addressed on this. However, in practice when problems are severe enough though, email alerts may never actually come, which is why you need to have an active monitoring system or in my opinion, it's good to have an active monitoring system, meaning that you have some sort of, you know, server, you know, there's basically going out and asking periodically like how are you doing, what's going on with you? Speaker 4 53:40 And by doing these types of checks and only obviously acting on those criteria that we consider to be, you know, a warning state or a critical state or even just an unknown state. Um, that's how we're sort of funneling our alerts. But by doing that, you are in essence also able to collect information such as performance data that over time really valuable in that. You can see, okay, we had an event, what led up to that event and why might that happen? So if you have a hard drive fail in and of itself, you're like, that hard drive failed. But if you take other performance metrics that we might be collecting along the way, such as what the environment was like at that particular time, heating and cooling, you can say, okay, there was a high likelihood that that hard drive failed because um, maybe it overheated or something like that. The air conditioner stopped working because we saw that we saw a rise in the temperature in the room because we had the ability to see that kind of data and we can kind of correlate the two. Speaker 0 54:54 So how did that use to work? I'm sorry, Ben, how did that use to work before this? Like just kind of walk me through, let's take that hypothetical scenario. Let's say the air conditioning had a, had a fault and a data center maybe. And before we had this ability to monitor this kind of data, what did that look like to an end user? Speaker 4 55:14 Um, something broke. Speaker 0 55:17 No, that's the little hard drive icon on my desktop. That is this hand. Speaker 4 55:21 Yeah. Like it was just like some, you know, I can't do my job and I don't know why. And it's your fault. And essentially like we had to come in and, and be Colombo and sort of, um, you know, you didn't get good information because they couldn't provide the information. Clem was a detective by the way, for those of us who are less than 40, I guess killing me. Sorry. It's okay. Speaker 0 55:48 I know who Colombia, Colombia, Colombia, Jessica Fletcher had a better reference or my grandmother loved Colombo. Yeah. Right. Okay. I a lot of times I think everybody knows who that is. There's new versions of him, so, Speaker 4 56:07 Okay. So, so you know, you know, ultimately it was like, Hey, this thing happens, this thing used to work. Now it doesn't work. And it might be this drive icon disappeared off my desktop. It might be, you know, I was playing video and it stopped playing and I haven't been able to play it back ever since Speaker 0 56:26 Frames I dropped frames or even I missed a delivery, a very important timely delivery because of this problem. And you know, at 3:00 AM after the delivery, it was already do. Everything just started working again and we can't really explain why, but, but, but at the end of the day, the delivery was missed and we don't know why. Speaker 4 56:47 Yeah. And a lot of times it's, there's a certain like black arts to it, right? Like there's this like, mystical, magical thing, you know? And, um, we've, you know, I'm sure everybody's done it at one point in their life. They're, they're like, um, you know, maybe if I turn it off and turn it back on, it'll just start to work again. And sometimes that works. Is there any science or logic to that? Not always. You know? Um, sometimes I've seen people who have taken hard drives and like blew on them. Like they were the old Nintendo, you know, or, or Commodore 64. Right. What's the Nintendo method you blow across? Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, or, um, I mean, I remember doing that as a kid with the Atari. Speaker 0 57:35 Yeah. We're aging ourselves again. That's okay. 2,600, totally fine. Right? Yeah. So before, you know, before this sort of proactive monitoring a scenario that we find ourselves in today, thankfully this is what we had was the, uh, this thing happened. We don't really know why it happened. We need you to figure it out because we don't want it to happen again. Right. Um, so, uh, Speaker 4 57:59 Or, or conversely, it wasn't even like this thing happened. It was, and we needed to figure it out so it doesn't happen again. It's like this thing that has happened and I have to hit my deadline, so you need to just fix it. Right. You know, and it was that, that was like the sacrifices you would end up making. It was like, okay, well there's the whole a triangle, which is, you know, you can good, fast, cheap. Pick two was kind of like that with troubleshooting. It was like, okay, well you can either, if you have this fast, then we can't tell you it won't ever happen again because we're just going to try to fix the problem, but we're not going to address anything else. Um, or if you need it fixed and resolve for good, we can't guarantee we're going to have it up anytime soon because it could take, you know, hours, days, depending on the severity of the issue. Speaker 4 58:45 So you had to make a choice. It was like, okay, but now by having these regular checks, we can do both, which is that we'll get you back up and running fast, maybe faster even than before. But then now, you know, we'll be able to sort of do a, you know, a, what's the word that everybody likes to throw around? Not triage. Uh Hmm. This is a good one. She has, this is a good one before, like when, uh, you know, uh, like whenever you have something that was a failure and then you begins with an R, it's, uh, that'll come to you. I hope it kind of syphilis. Speaker 0 59:26 But having this visualization of this, of these checks and this data, um, I think also can help you make decisions about how you might need to make changes in your environment in the future. If something like this is happening on a regular basis or maybe even, Hey, we're running out of storage. What? What do we do? Do we archive some stuff off? Do we need more storage? Like has as our project load grown to the point where like we really do need this much work in progress storage and you know, how much have we been using per project over the course of this quarter or last quarter? What are the growth rates? How can we prepare best for the future and inform those who are in control of the purse strings that Hey, you're going to need to fork it out or Speaker 4 00:04 Well, yeah, that's a good unexpected consequence or unexpected. I say about unexpected consequence but not unexpected. It's like a benefit than intended unintended benefit, intended benefit, which is that ultimately you have certain situations like where especially with production storage, it's like, okay, we're adding a terabyte a day every day at this rate we're going to need more storage, you know, in a month. Well, when you can kind of look and you see like a historical trend, you can basically say, okay, no, this is only happening because it's two years ago and it's the presidential election and it's November. Right? And, and if we look historically, you know, every election cycle, this is what happens. It lasts for, you know, whatever, 26 days and then it, and then it tapers, right? So, so you don't archive it and nobody cares. Again, this is, this is, yeah, this is, you know, one and done kind of stuff. Speaker 4 01:06 So by being able to see that, not only can you advise people when they need to buy stuff, but you can also advise people when no, you're okay, save your money and invest it in this other thing. You know, like, Hey, your render farm is always operating at 99% CPU usage and you're missing your deadlines because you've told us you're missing your deadline. So why don't we add, instead of taking this money where you wanted to, by any rate, let's add a couple more nodes to your render farm. And then, you know, maybe you'll start hitting those deadlines again. Speaker 0 01:41 And again, that scenario that the hypothetical scenario that Brian just mentioned is yet another reason why, uh, working with an integrator is such a great thing because we already know, we already know where you're at in terms of storage, in terms of how big your render farm is. So we can talk about what are you missing and where you need to put your money next. Uh, so that, you know, again, more benefits talking about visualization of some of that time series data and performance data to, to help qualify and even present that information to the people that need to sign the check. You know, uh, we are, especially in this age of, of big data right now, data is what everybody wants to see. They want to graphs, they want Speaker 3 02:19 To see trends and everybody loves, everybody loves pretty charts. Yeah, exactly. So, um, so that's great. Um, so let's take the, uh, the episode back to Marina a little bit. I want to talk to you Marina about what does it look like. So I, Hey guys, I just listened to the workflow show episode 36 managed services. Sounds great. Get me on board. What, what does it look like from there? Where do we start first before I completely forget this, the word you were looking for was remediation. Thank you. Thank you. Wait a circle like that. And that's why we all love. But yeah, before I completely forgot that that was the word you were looking for. Um, where we go from here, every client when they're new or even existing, we'll go through the onboarding process. They'll walk that through with me or with one of the support engineers to kind of get you integrated into our system. Speaker 3 03:11 So we do have a portal, um, check it out, force.com which allows you to go and enter in your support cases. Uh, you can pick your severity, um, or your priority saying, you know, if it's a P one or P two or P three P one being the worst P three being, you know, just a general question or inquiry. And then with that tying into your SLA, what your response time is as well. So whether that's within an hour, within 24 hours. Correct. And that really comes down to the conversation you have with your account manager and what you're looking for in terms of response and resolution and how we get that to you. Um, then you know, when you open a support case through the portal, um, that'll notify the support team and you'll get a response on whether it's an acknowledgement of receiving your case or an immediate response saying, you know, we're looking into it. Speaker 3 04:02 We'll let you know if we have any questions and then we'll go from there. Might need some more information. You might need to know, like, what were you doing at the time? Something like that. And it just challenged my information and just kind of like, it's a, you know, there is guiding questions within the support portal. You know, what the business impact is, who it affects, when did it happen, are there logs? So it gives you the option to give us as much information as possible so that we can immediately go in and dive in and say, okay, they're having issues with sand connectivity. You know, let's go look at the sand and let's go look at the logs. Are their data flush errors? Oh, there's probably a sleeping machine that's a quick and easy fix. Let's wake up the machine. What about we just finished our project like two months ago and there's a thing that's not working and there's this engineer that I know worked on the project and you know, I know he'll know or she'll know what, what the, what the solution is. Well, luckily we have a lovely project handoff so that you don't have to rely just on the engineer that you worked in in the project, but the support team understands what your needs are in that workflow, in that new environment that was just recently integrated within your system. So once the project's completed, those engineers hand it off to the support team so that we can support the solutions that were built for you. And there's certainly still part of the chest Speaker 0 05:17 Of family. They're still there, right? So it's of course Holloway Slack nerve going away is really, I think the most appropriate way. Don't you worry. So, uh, so that engineer is, is not an accessible to the client, but of course, you know, uh, I guess the way I would put it as that we feel that it's very important to have a team supporting your environment and not just one person. Because what happens if that one person gets hit by the bus on, you know, I hate to use the, you know, the quintessential phrase, but you know, the hit by the bus scenario is truly why we implemented swarming. So in circling back to that is a, you know, although they're not directly on the support team, if we do run into an issue there is that swarming aspect we can reach out to them. Is swarming a, is that like an industry term? Speaker 0 06:05 Is that something we came up with? No, it's an industry term. Short term. This is the idea that you will probably work with one person to start, but they will involve the right people to help solve the problem that you're having. Exactly. And that's how you know, we discussed earlier it's seminated that information. It's, you know, yes, there is that one person in that project who worked on it, but now it's that opportunity for that project engineer to help out that support engineer so that they can learn how to resolve the situations and that we're not relying on that one person because they're going to go on vacation, they're make a hit on a ball. I got hit by a bus or they might just be out for the terror. They might be working on another project and we want to make sure that we're resolving your issue as quickly as possible. Speaker 0 06:49 We don't want to leave you waiting because there's only one person who knows it. We make sure that everybody knows it so that there isn't that scenario. Great. Yeah, so that is how I would say like you know, in terms of how long I've been with Chesapeake systems, how the process has changed quite a bit because it did used to be that sort of like, well you know this one engineer did this project, so that's the engineer that's supporting that system and any questions go directly to that engineer and we've seen the need as, especially as we've grown and as we've had more diverse clients. I mean we've already talked about how important it is to work with an integrator when you're dealing with storage, digital asset management, archiving, networking, you know all of those things are a part of the system. But then you've got on top of that all the different verticals and types of media that these clients are working with their different processes and workflows, what's important to them. Speaker 0 07:41 Maybe one is working with a more cloud based solution. One is working with more of an on prem solution. Maybe it's an on prem hybrid cloud solution. That's what makes us so valuable is the fact that because we have so many clients with so many different environments, when another client asks us, have you seen this before? Most likely we have, most likely we have and most likely seen. We've either seen it be really successful or we've had to modify it to make sure that it worked as it could for that client. And every client's different, every client has their own unique corks and what their environment is like. But at the end of the day, they all want a similar solution. And at the end of the day they Speaker 3 08:16 Like working with us because we understand their environment, we understand their need, and we understand that. We want to make sure that they're happy with what they purchased. It's about the client, it's about what their experiences is. And if their experience is terrible and this product never works, then we failed and we don't fail and we fail, we come back stronger. Right? So it's that. It's that idea of, and that notion of like as a support team, we're constantly driving to make sure that not only are we successful here at Chesapeake, but we also are a part of the organization itself. We are a part of their it department as a contractor, as subsidiary to compliment what they already have in house. Right. Speaker 0 09:00 I can attest to that. I'm sure everyone here on this podcast can attest to the fact that, you know, we work with so many different types of organizations. Some teams that we work with have some very technical resources on staff that are there to be the frontline support for their team. Others, we are the frontline support for the team. So, uh, that is just a, I think a great way to describe how versatile we are as a partner to work with many different types of organizations. Oh yeah. And that's why, you know, talking to your account manager, really analyzing what you're looking for in terms of ongoing support. What do you really need? If you have people who are onsite, then we don't need them Speaker 3 09:37 Be your tier one, you know, then where your escalation, because we are the experts and then, you know, if it comes down to it and we have to reach out to a vendor, that's something we can take care of for you. That we can make sure that we're following up with them so that you're being able to focus on your job and we can help you get to that resolution Speaker 0 09:54 Mediation. And you know what we're looking to accomplish altogether. Right? We are hungry for knowledge. We are always looking to learn something new. That's another thing that sets us apart. Uh, I don't want to paint the picture that others don't, but it sets us apart. We want to know how things work together. We want to know how things affect other things in an environment. And uh, that means that sometimes we have to get several parties on the phone. Some of those parties may be within the client's organization. Maybe we're dealing with the production team and the it team, and then several vendors on the other side of it. And we're trying to get everyone to the table to talk about a solution, how things can work together, maybe why they're not working together, things like that. Sometimes it's just interfacing with one or two people within the organization, but the versatility of how we solve those problems is, is really key here. All right, well, uh, thank you all for listening. I think that kind of wraps up this episode of the workflow show, uh, on managed services. If you have any questions, we'd love to hear from you. Uh, you can email [email protected] or just visit our website at www dot <inaudible> dot com or you know, if you've got an account manager, which you probably do, reach out to them.