Transcript
You know, you've been at Southstar Bank for over 10 years. You've been using our solutions for a lot of the time there, but I kind of want to start with just kind of getting some perspective on you on how your role has evolved there. And I know there's been significant internal and external change. What does that mean for you, your team and technology there at Southstar? Yeah, I mean, when we when I first started, we were, you know, going through an M&A, right? Same ownership, but three different banks coming together. And obviously, there's a lot of tools there coming into play. And we kind of went through the just with Landesk. And we were kind of going to EPM. And then we kind of really got on that journey, started with there. And then we needed to kind of make some more maturity jumps on that as we started getting a hold of things and we were continuing to grow. And we're kind of thinking, man, how do we kind of take that that next step, right? So we had our, you know, our CSA going and you're able to go out and kind of touch things. But the world of working remotely was picking up once again, but more than with just our sales staff like you're right. So and of course, COVID was kind of coming in and just kind of hit everybody upside the head, right? And so we were fortunate that, you know, I've had a great team. Shout out to my guy, Nick, who was like, hey, you know, he showed me Avanti Cloud at the time. And I did. I pooh poohed it right at the back and said, this is not right. This is just take a look at it again. And I was working off the table in my garage in August and in summer in Texas. You can imagine what that was like. And that's OK. You know what? This is painful enough as it is. But let's go ahead and give this another shout. And I did it. And really, it was it was great. I was up and going in like 30 minutes, got my connectors going and was able to push that out to where I needed to be. And I was able to reach out and touch everything and really get information. And see the power of of basically of viewing, analyzing, solving problems quickly, which is now which was then Avanti Cloud, Neurons for UEM, now AEM. Right. So to where we could basically see what was happening, solve problems before our customers knew they have them. And even at a point where people is everywhere and anything and really figure it out and kind of mature in that process from edge intelligence to bots and let the user contribute to that experience as well. And now with things like DEX involved, so it's kind of really matured on that journey. But that's kind of how we got started. And we continue to grow in that process today. Yeah, I mean, I think we're certainly seeing many of our customers kind of go through the same evolution. And you mentioned the CSA, that's our cloud service appliance for our on-prem and point management. And certainly being able to manage those remote users, I mean, we've had that technology since the early 2000s. Right. I mean, we knew this was a problem, very complicated to handle in many different solutions. But being able to kind of transition to a kind of cloud only tool certainly has been valuable, I think, especially through your description of that. What sort of precipitated the move primarily for your team to or kind of from on-prem and point management into more of a cloud AEM solution like what you have with Avanti? Yeah, I mean, there's several things that go with that, right. So wherever anybody goes as they travel, right, or maybe they're working from home, we had the, we call it snowmageddon in Texas because we had an inch of snow maybe over a course of day. That's a lot for Texas, for sure. Yeah, right. But where we had, I needed to be able to even get into an iPad and basically check on things and make sure that they're up and functional. But also from the patching perspective, right, and security from, and I want to put all these elements together and then kind of paint one picture for you from patch, from software distribution to, or may talk about like bots for autonomous response to reaching out and touching the customer's endpoint and for them and saying, hey, wherever you are, whatever it is, we're going to be able to look, detect, and remediate, not just respond, but remediate before they know and whatever the state that the endpoint's in, how do we remediate that problem? Because that's the different answer there. We can respond, but in order to, I don't want to just respond. I want to remediate before they know, or how do I remediate within one click, right? We have bots that are built in into the device, the Dex view, and just one click resolution for them to make it less stressful, make it better. And so whether it's things that are plugged into our stored in Azure instead of on-premise making things, so it's where, again, wherever they are, how do we secure the device after discover, secure, and implement the solutions we need so they're up and they're as effective as possible? That's really the goal, right? So that's kind of where we continue to grow. And it's a nonstop cycle. We evaluate, continue to go through that process. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned automation there a few times, and certainly a driver for a lot of these solutions is kind of the first word there is autonomous, right? How do I get to the point where the solution can give me the visibility I'm looking for, assist in my next steps, and then finally take some automation? That very frequently brings up the conversation around sort of this reactive versus proactive IT methodology. What does that look like in practice for you and your team? Do you feel like you guys are able to get proactive and reduce the pain cycles, or is it still a lot of firefighting? So I think, I mean, it truly goes through cycles, right? I mean, part of it goes into having candid conversations with your team and saying what users always contribute to this conversation, right? Within tickets, phone calls, whatever they do, and that's always part of it, but also using the tools that we have in AM with Edge Intelligence, and they're saying, hey, what are we seeing? And I call that my little mad scientist lab because I'm really able, I love what Ben Kerbers and the team did there, and they're always doing it. It's awesome. And really being able to break things down, but you're able to really see what is happening and then being able to build that back, right? We have ITSM, and what we're seeing in trending, we can then reverse that and say, okay, what are some root cause things, and then how do I remediate that going from small and kind of a reverse onion layer, right, and build that in, and then get much bigger on that, more efficient. And that's anywhere from we're trying to make sure we have certain pieces of software on something to Microsoft likes to press the pause button on the world, how do I handle that? Or a patch goes bad, and I need to make sure my cycle is like, what is the root cause of those, and how do I remediate that? So that happens in several different ways, but again, there's always your users are contributing their way to we are looking at what is causing problems from anything from blue screen errors to application crashes to sign-in problems to poor performance on the devices, and then kind of slowly working that back and having a team and saying, we have discussions weekly and saying, okay, this is what I'm working on. Here's my problems. What can we do to solve it? What would be a little bit better? And it's constant contributing, and then the team taking different parts of it, and all credit to my team of wanting to drive that forward to make it better, right? The more that we have clean automation, to your point, right, making sure it's clean and simple, and I always encourage making it very simple, that continues to be a positive thing for us. Yeah, no, I totally get it. And a similar experience even for me when I was before I was on this side of the fence where you're trying to be as proactive as possible and looking for avenues in order to do that, still have to, you know, the day job is still there, tickets are still coming in, and you're just still having the problems that they run into. But I think as those things are happening, you're sort of learning from them and trying to figure out sort of a problem management type of perspective where you can get in front of a lot of those stuff preemptively and put yourself in a better position. So I totally get it. You know, at Advance, we recently did an AEM report, hopefully everyone on today has seen it. If you haven't, please go check it out. One of the very interesting bits from that, at least that I found, is that organizations, two thirds of organizations that we spoke to felt like they haven't been able to meaningfully implement automation. And, you know, we got all sorts of feedback related to that. You know, they have too many tools, and it's tough to integrate them. You know, it's really tough to change kind of the internal cultures around automation. And, you know, in your experience, what does that adoption really look like? And, you know, how does your team find avenues to continue to really push and adopt change to apply more automation in the organization? So I think there's a few bits to that that are important. One, in order for automation to work well, you have to understand you're only limited by your own creativity and your own knowledge of what you're trying to implement. So those two things there are so important, right? So if you have no knowledge of what you're trying to work around, well, then you have no platform to work with there, right? So if I'm trying to automate password resets, but I don't know what's doing the password reset, well, then I can't do anything, right? But also, but if I am automatically going in and I'm just, I just can't do this. Be creative. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to fail big, right? Be how many ways can I do this, right? Maybe there's four ways to do this, and maybe there's two good ways and one way is the best way. And, you know, oh, I've got all these different tools and look at it as I've got a, you know, a box of Legos or blocks, whatever you want to envision this, and I can build this any way I want. And maybe as you find a way that works best for you, right? And how do you want to do it? So be creative. Don't be afraid to be creative. And, you know, it can turn into a time suck if you do it, you have to manage your time and get to it. But if you want to whiteboard at first, do that. But that's the first thing. That's a very important when using automation is you have to go back and try to be creative with some of these things. Because there are hurdles in time. So you have to jump through and be up front with yourself and your team about, OK, how if we can't do there, how can don't just find no and then turn away. What are some other ways we can do this? Second one is pick something simple and that you have within your immediate control that you can do and do that very, very well. Do it consistently. Prove what you can do. Do it as much as possible and make sure it works. Get a good track record going. That's things you can that you can control. And so you have a good track record to prove. Then when you want to venture out or do something else, say, hey, look, hey, here's the next thing, Mr. Boss, a boss lady. Here's what what I can help you with, what we're trying to solve. Here's my track record. Let me show you what we can do, right? Oh, I didn't know you were doing this. Yep. We've been doing it for three months. Oh, that was you guys. Cool. And then use your you have documentation of your of your automation to show we started at this. Then we have this. This is what we've done. We want to so we can do this for you. Right. And I can prove so you have metrics to prove yourself so you can then go in. But if you kind of don't really do something, start small and then work your way bigger and then keep cleaning things up as it goes, that's going to be difficult. It can run away. The other thing is have more than one person who knows how to do it. If Johnny goes on leave. And you need something done or somebody answer questions. And he's that means it makes it hard for Johnny to take any time off, but also there needs to be some competency within the team to do it. And so don't be afraid to ask for help on that. No, I love that. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And, you know, I love your call out around, you know, summarizing a little bit, you know, not being the office of no. Right. I think automation is one of those things that can certainly put you in a bad spot if you're just kind of blindly going after things and and not really taking the time to understand what that means for the business, what the biggest pain points are and and how to effectively apply change to the environment. I think the working with stakeholder side of it is so important because, like you said, that, you know, there's there's certainly resistance to your teams just doing things. And, you know, I think it's it's it's super valuable to make sure everyone understands here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it. And here's the benefit for the business, for us making these changes. So that's that's fantastic. I'm going to shift a little bit to kind of more of a kind of cyber security area of the conversation. You mentioned you guys are using our patch solution. You have been for a long time, which is awesome. You know, I think cyber hygiene today is is is a big struggle for a lot of our customers. And they're dealing with all sorts of different threats, zero days, ransomware, you know, patch management's only kind of one part of it. And really understanding where all the exposures are has become more and more critical. You know, for for your organization, what does what does good cyber hygiene really look like? And what what sort of tactics are you employing to make sure that you're meeting your SLAs and staying as as as compliant as possible? Because, you know, you guys are a bank as well. We didn't talk about that too much, but you've got some some sort of regulations that you have to meet as well. So what does that really look like for your organization? Yeah, the regulatory part is first and foremost, right, can be the overshadowing piece that can be looming all the time. Right. So it's right. So we we always think about how do I keep the institution safe? But at the same time, it's like I need to get we take a risk based approach if we want to make sure we hit zero days. And sometimes that means there's also an out of band patch that needs to be carried because Microsoft broke something or, you know, there may be something that Adobe's has something needs to be squared away or whatever. Right. But at the same time, regulatory wise, you need to if I need to hit certain areas of the of the wall to get it squared off, Microsoft says, that's great. You still have to paint the whole wall. Right. No matter what. So the idea is to say, well, the risk based approach of how do I reduce my risk as fast as possible, even if I've got to get everything right? This is what I do. I need to, you know, close the windows, close the doors. You know, how do I reduce that risk and do that as fast as possible? So using I mean, Avanti's patch engine and going by risk is 100 percent things we like to go by and use. We also do ring deployment cycles. So we're able to know if something is a problem. You know, we have a pilot group that spreads. We have a pretty well balanced and is reevaluated. And so we're like, hey, they we get feedback. Nothing's perfect on there, obviously. But that's kind of the first way we look at that. And I'm really excited about the new the new piece that's kind of up and coming, that's going to look at, you know, the security side as well for exposure and assets and and. On the defensive side of the house, I guess you could say, right, that gives the the CISO role side that they can kind of look in and say, what does our risk look like and give some prioritization and make sure we're handling that as well. So I'm excited about that as well. But we have also been utilizing a lot of the reporting within it for not just audit, but also to handle and say, hey, you know, how are we doing? What it's been? Some some hold ups. We looks like we've made some headway, but we have a problem here. This needs some love and almost kind of we kind of gamify it. Right. How is it? How to get the needle just a little bit more. Right. So that's kind of our approach to it. But again, it's very risk based, not just slap some more paint on the wall and we'll get to it eventually. And, you know, if I come back around to it and a lot of big shout out to to the team for making that something that we can use for risk based approach. You know, if there's something that's alive in the wild and threat actors are using it, we want to know about it. We want to square that away. And that is something we're we definitely use to secure our end. So. Yeah, and hopefully many on on today and those watching intend on coming to our live events this year. We've got a great showcase around kind of visibility we can provide. As a system of record, we have a ton of functionality and knowledge about your environment that absolutely take into consideration a lot of the IP about your business, which is great. But on top of that, we're providing layers so that you can utilize AI to get at the information around those exposures, the risks that they potentially have against your environment so that when crunch time hits, when that zero day happens or when there's a problem that needs to be fixed, you can get at the information that we already have for you and put you in a much better position. So certainly look out for that next live event. It's in Houston and then and then New York this year. So that's fantastic. You know, Jesse, something that I think you're one of the first, maybe the only people I've heard kind of refer to this concept of contactless intervention. And it's really something that I, you know, near and dear to my heart as someone who has been in this industry for a long time, the idea that we can remediate issues for users without having to sort of break the continuity of the work that they're doing. And very often before they even run into an issue, I think it's fantastic. You know, how does that change the type of work you and your team do on a regular basis? I know there's certainly a proactive aspect of it, but as you really evangelize this idea of contactless intervention in your organization, what does that look like and how does that improve things for you and your team? Yeah, and I mean, real quick, some background. So I was kind of back before my current role. I realized that we have a lot of people there under the pressure. And you, I mean, we all kind of understand you have somebody, whether they're in a bind that their card's not working or they're at the gas pump, they're having problems or, you know, they're trying to secure their first home, you know, and they're, nothing stresses people out more than money, right? So the idea of how do we help our frontline team put on the best service they possibly can means that I need to put on the best I can for them. It's not interrupting what they're doing to help the customer, right? So the first thing that came in and said, how do I solve the problem without actually having to remote into their machine, fixing it? Meaning I'm using, again, going back to the mad scientist lab of everything in edge intelligence and then automating an action or using those bots saying, yep, we know what the problem is. We've already detected it. If it can be proactively done, it's done. But if not, you know, how many of those one button fixes do we have? Like, yeah, I can restart your print spooler. I don't have to remote into do that. You know, I can kill that program. I don't even, you know, I could teach you how to do it, but I can also just kill that process that's hung. I can do this. I can be like everything. We can square that away. I can run a quick script on there. I can do so many things we can handle with. So they're still on the phone handling, talking to it, everything. Cool. And a little chat in teams. Hey, you good to go now? Yeah, it's just working again. Yep. Magic wand was waived. It happened, right? And we intervened. We stepped in between them and the actual problem. And then sometimes it's just a temporary thing because a lot of times you see vendors that know they have a problem. They don't have a solution. And there's just workarounds that have to be in place. And that's kind of the deal, right? How do we make sure the tools that our fellow employees have are as sharp as possible? So ultimately, our businesses are profitable that we're putting on the best foot forward that we can be. And that's kind of the goal of saying, what are all, depending on our industry, what are all areas do we need to do? And maybe that's making sure your custom actions are slotted in with ITSM, build out those bots and they can feed in there. Or you continue to build out those different parts of bots. But also understanding that you have access to services and processes inside of the device for you and you utilize them more. So and just making sure that you are able to help them and solve their issue before you even have to pick up the phone. So. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, Justin, we do have a question from chat that I'd like to share with you and get your perspective on. This is from Dan. Do you have any scenarios like printing nightmare that happened? I think we all we all sort of saw the pain of that where you were able to remediate via kind of the autonomous solution inside of environment. What did that look like for your organization and and how did you utilize the tools to sort of deal with that? So yeah, I mean, I will say we've had our own, I mean, more than one. I'm trying to come up with probably the best one. I mean, we've had our fair share, and I think one of probably one of the best ones would be where we needed to check for services that were running on some crucial, crucial servers that we have in house. Right. And then basically check for them, making sure they're running and then when off, restart them. And even where files need to get, they get renamed when certain things go upside down and then need to rename this stop services, rename them files, restart services and get going. Right. So there's that. So things that are that intricate as well for production servers that have to happen as far as even things like print nightmare, you know, detection and response where it's like, hey, we need to basically run the bot to detect if it's things are in a bad state, then send, basically send them the right patch out that we need to go like was stored in our Azure blob and then run that and then do another scan and check again and then basically go through the whole process and then using some math calculations that you can now use math functions. And if we can't complete it, then we create a ticket and then somebody can be like, hey, by the way, can we go take care of this? And like, oh, I didn't know I had a problem. Right. That's the best thing to hear. Right. Like, oh yeah, we'll be done here shortly. Let me, let me just square you away real quick. And then my guy, Jeremy or Chris just knocks out of the park and they're like, oh, cool. We, we, we just didn't even know. So, I mean, we've, that's kind of been two quick examples off the top of my head that we've kind of done and squared away. But, but yeah, we've been very fortunate that we've had some, some creative staff members that have been creative bots and stuff. And we also did a Windows 10 to 11 migration similarly as well. Nice. Yep, absolutely. All right. Well, you know, we've got a minute left, Jesse, kind of want to wrap with this, you know, what's next for you? What, what, it sounds like you've been solving big problems, which is fantastic. What's the, what's the next big problem that you, you want to solve? And what does that look like for you? The next big problem, um, probably my next big problem would be, probably is going to be the reduction of like removal of, of, it's going to be continuing to clean up specific, uh, profiles again, like I am, and, uh, software that like for things that are not in use, right. So we have a lot of shared stations. So I, right now I have it pretty set up in, in a wide, uh, timeframe. I want to narrow that down quite a bit. Uh, and then also kind of autonomous, like creating scripts or using bots with some better scripts to log them into these shared stations better. So they don't have to continue to click and click and click, click, and then get that done. So that's a fairly large one. Um, and then I want to get my team stuff back up and running. I've kind of fallen off the wagon on that one. I had some pretty good ones built in and I kind of want to get that up and going. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jesse. I appreciate the time today. Uh, everyone, again, I think we dropped some, some good links to the things that we've got going on, uh, in chat with you. Definitely check out the Innovators Hub and, uh, certainly reach out if you have any questions or anything that you potentially missed today. But thanks everyone for the time, Jesse. Again, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Yeah, thanks for having me. And we'll talk again soon. Cheers.
