 JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey guys, welcome, welcome to our podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scotto-Cotaia, founder and CEO of Jamie Scotto and Associates JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer, you know him well, Mr. Evan Christel. Hey Jamie, so we are live. Lots of opportunities for things to go terribly wrong, but I'll try not to embarrass you. Welcome to Data Movers where we sit down with the most influential men and women in today's leading telco and data center world, supporting the infrastructure requirements of this modern world. And speaking of modern world, is this a year of AI or what? It's like every day all AI all the time. Oh my goodness, we are diving into chat GPT here at JSA. Can't get enough of it. It's addictive, right? Like you're starting to play around like, okay, so write me a poem, build me an ad, give me a graphic, give me a spokesperson. Create a PowerPoint presentation in code that you can just upload to PowerPoint. Like all of the things I hate doing, it seems to be able to do pretty well. It's kind of mind-blowing, yeah. I mean, I've had friends who were like, give me a business model for a $3 billion profitable company. And like, you know, so there's there, I mean, this platform is getting tested. We can see it. Well, you're a content creation machine. You turn out blogs and white papers and all kinds of written content. So what does this mean for your business? Is it just gonna supercharge it? Is it mean you can fire half your staff? No. Or what's going on? No, our team is our family. Okay, sorry, sorry, Keem. But we are supercharging, you know, if we can take, you know, 30, 50% of time spent on curating as much research as possible to make a really solid outline before we begin any article or a blog or, you know, but it still needs the human touch. We still need the strategy. We still need the alignment in our clients' business models and our marketing campaigns. We still wanna make sure that the content is, I feel like chat GPT is going to clutter the market with a lot of like E plus content, right? And we're in the business of A plus content. And so that means keeping our writers, editors, technical focused, industry focused, mindful of the trending topics, et cetera, you know, adding all that in that layer of oversight and human touch, human connections. And of course, once you have that content, what good is content if you don't promote it? So making sure we're leveraging our relationships and our human connectivity to get that word out to the marketplace in a meaningful way and above all that C plus clutter. Well, we're an A plus team here and I don't think I'm gonna be replaced by a bot at least on live streams anytime soon. So that's good news. Why don't we get to our guests because we have a really interesting discussion around voice communication, something we don't always focus on here at Data Movers. We really can't wait to bring him in. We are so excited to be joined by Mr. Chuck French, the chief growth officer at Mutare. Nice to be here. Hi, Jamie. Hi, Evan. Hi, Tim. Welcome Chuck from Chicagoland, one of my favorite cities. And I'm really excited to talk about voice because, you know, voice is often overlooked when it comes to cybersecurity topics and you guys are the first time here at Data Movers. So we're gonna ask you for an introduction and talk about your impact in securing, transforming the voice communications, voice messaging world, you know, what that means for secure communications. Perfect. Well, it'd be a pleasure to introduce you to Mutare and to start, we've been around for a long time, really long time, over 30 years. Always in the business communication software space. And for us, a lot's happened with us over time. So you guys were talking about ChatGPT earlier, disruptions. I mean, think about all the disruptions over the last 30 years that have happened. Yet we've remained. And that's really part of one of our superpowers which we'll talk about. We really highly agile and quality developer of software. Another thing that I like to think of as a superpower is our customer support. We keep our customers happy and we develop personal relationships with them. And when I think about that, I was a couple of years ago, I was up in Canada for some show and someone had heard I was from Mutare and literally they searched me out and they said, hey, I just wanted to let you know that I work with Patty, one of our colleagues in our operations department. That just doesn't happen normally in most companies. And it's probably one of the things that really, again, makes us a little different than others, the tenure of our people and our culture. Jamie, you talked about it earlier. I heard in the earlier intro segment, our team. I mean, that's our family. And anyways, I'm getting a little off track. So let me get to your question. In our 30 years, we've had a consistent track record of profitability. We've got no debt and it's not a bad place for an organization in this environment, particularly right now. We have over 400 enterprise customers. We do business in every conceivable vertical. We have a mature HIPAA compliance program. It just kind of layers upon itself, but the company is just kind of different, but in a really good way. And we're about to become even more so. And so let me explain how we're transforming voice traffic. Using all those skills we developed for 30 years and specifically related to our best in class business voicemail system. We decided to solve the problem of unwanted calls coming into the enterprise. These are nefarious calls and nuisance calls and we'll talk probably more about those later, but we decided to take on the challenge and solve the problem because frankly it's the right thing to do. We can do it, but there's another reason. We're in the midst of scaling the company and we're doing it with a purpose. So the Atari employees are purchasing the company right now by something called an employee stock ownership plan. Have you ever heard of an ESOP plan? Yeah. Not recently, tell me more. Well, it's effectively, we're buying Mutari through an qualified retirement plan. That's what it is. Wow. And so we're doing it through our, which is really kind of cool because I share it with you because it's a massive differentiator for us. It makes us more aligned as an organization obviously, and clearly focused because we're all kind of rolling the same way trying to make that happen. So I would argue we're probably the most focused company. You might have met and potentially had on this podcast so far. Really? It's like mission like work. So I'll add one more thing. From a security perspective, and this is kind of an important part. So we're gonna stop these unwanted calls, but from a security perspective and this ties into the mission. The industry as a whole suffers from this bias that voice traffic that's coming into the organization doesn't really pose a lot of risk to the business. And that only unsophisticated would fall prey to these things that happen over the phone. And really the opposite's true. And that's why it's being exploited. And that's why our work's so important. There's that open door, the voice network. And that's what we're here for. We're here to shut the door. Yeah. I mean, I know when I was first introduced with Mutari, I was so blown away and I was like, oh my goodness, I need this for JSA. I need this for everyone to know about because I literally scan block calls coming in. If I don't know who you are, if you're not part of my existing contacts, I'm not picking you up. And as a sales leader, that would be a bad thing to do. But I think we're just all so tired of spam. And it's led us to like, hey, if you're not emailing me already, I don't wanna hear from you. So bending over to, for those who don't know you as well as I do, can you tell us, you have an industry leading voice traffic filter and I believe it has five distinct filters. Can you tell us a little bit more of what they do? Yeah, no, it'd be a pleasure. And maybe before I do that, let me start and give you a little context about the intent of the system. So our stated goal, so then the layers make a little bit more sense, but our stated goal is to stop on unwanted calls before your telephone rings. So think about that. So it's not, maybe you've experienced something where you kind of see a half ring or you see something where there's an indicator that it might be spam, we don't want the phone to ring at all. So that's the action. By the way, that's one of the reasons why what we're doing right now hasn't been accomplished before. It's really hard to do. It's not like you can quarantine a call, like an email and inspect it. You have to be wicked fast about everything that you're doing here. So we interrogate a call in less than a third of a second and usually in less than a tenth of a second, it's imperceptible to the calling party. So the question now is, what are we doing with that call? And that's where the five layers come in. So I'll go pretty quick through them, but one of them would be stir shaking and Evan probably understands or has heard about stir shaking that's the first layer of it. So think of stir shaking as those technologies that determine whether or not a caller ID is validated. So we all have caller IDs on the phone. So whether that's valid, meaning does the calling party actually have the right to use that specific phone number and the corresponding caller ID? Carriers aren't blocking calls and the meaning of the way using that and they won't because they don't want the liability of blocking a legitimate call, but instead they call through. And so what you get is maybe you get in your caller ID of V for validate or it might say potential spam, but the telephone still rings. So stir shaking, it does provide important information. So our Atari voice traffic filter, which is our solution, takes that information from the carrier and it uses as an input to the voice traffic filter. So we can use that to block the call if the administrator wants that to happen. So that's kind of the first layer and all these layers work together. They're not serial, they all happen at the same time. So the second layer is our proprietary dynamic database. So when that call comes in, we check the number against that database. It's extremely large, has over six million numbers in it and it changes all the time. It's updated in real time. It's a source for multiple vendors. It consists of do not originate list and possible numbers. And depending on the rule settings, the system, again, this is all about giving the power to an organization. They can either choose to drop the call, let it through the intended recipient or send it elsewhere for further scrutiny. So that's the second layer of the five layers. Then we have something called threat radar. So think of this. Let's say you're getting a lot of calls and this would only happen in an organization. It's like, not as an individual, but as a company. You have a lot of unusual calls coming in and perhaps they're coming in all at once. It might be ringing in a serial fashion. We've had people telling us that they're in the office and they could see, they could hear the phone number. All the phones ringing along the organization. Those types of activities, that unusual stuff, that trips the threat radar. It's machine learning. So you guys were talking about chat, GPT. Machine learning is another one of those. We use that to learn about what's happening with the behavioral pattern of calls coming in an organization. And if it sees that it's kind of a weird pattern, you don't know, threat radar might block the call or more likely it sends it to the next layer. And that's called voice capture. And that features the, we call it our fail-safe application. And voice capture, really, if the system thinks that there's a fraudulent call or a call that you don't necessarily want, maybe from the dynamic database, perhaps it's not validated by the carrier. The system puts it through a reverse Turing test that separates a bot from a human. So when a caller arrives at voice capture, the caller's challenged to enter a series of digits to prove they're a legitimate caller. Humans can do it, right? Please, hey, thanks for calling. Please enter 312 to continue. A robocaller can't. So if you've ever had to prove, I'm not a robot on a webpage, you understand the concept we're on, voice capture. Yeah, that's brilliant. And I've literally stopped answering the phone personally. So I can see the value of this tremendously. And I imagine it's for not just enterprise, but contact centers where calls are money and filtering and identifying those calls is pretty important. What other kind of call types are filtered? And how big a problem is this? Have you looked at quantifying the market size or the impact in terms of dollars? Well, yes, there's a lot of questions there. So before I get to that, Evan, just one more thing that I'd like to add about the layer. There's also a custom rules layer. I think it's important that the listeners understand that because every organization has a different view and this gets to your question about what calls they wanna come in. And you have to have the ability to have custom rules set up and an easy to use interface to make that happen. So if you're a hospital, you might say, hey, Chuck, make sure that Mutari sinks, right? The system sinks with my patient list. So you never block someone who's a patient as an example. But it could be that, hey, we shouldn't get calls from Russia, block the entire country. So it's completely intuitive in terms of what we're able to do. So that gets to your question, like, well, is this a big problem? Yes, it is, but every company's gonna look at it a little differently. You mentioned call centers, it's a huge issue because these calls are coming in and call centers have to staff for a certain amount of calls. So a call comes in and you have dead air calls where your staff includes dead air calls. You might have abandoned calls that are not humans that are in there. That affects a KPI for a call center. If you're a hospital or a healthcare system, you might get reimbursed based on how well you respond to people calling in. It could literally impact your reimbursement rate in terms of how quickly and how well you're responding to these calls, huge implications to call centers. So when we look at the problem in total, on average, and we get to see all kinds of different verticals and all kinds of data, on average about 9 to 10% of all calls that are being made into the enterprise are unwanted calls. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah. All right, so that begs the question. What can we do right now to protect our businesses and employees from these scammers? So, yes, that's a big question. Right? So, sorry. No, no, it is, but obviously training, right? I mean, we should all be trained and the stats would indicate that companies train people for to protect them against email phishing attacks like 70 plus percent of companies are training for that. 37% are training against voice phishing attacks. And think about the irony of that, right? They have, when you're training people, 70 to some odd percent of the time, but you have an email spam filter in there to protect the human beings. You go over to the voice side, you're training a much less and you have nothing to protect the humans. And the humans are the by far, the most vulnerable part of any kind of security strategy. 95% of all break-ins or breaches are caused by humans. So, to answer your question, Jamie, directly train them. That's the easiest one. But, you know, human beings aren't gonna do well against an adversary, a bad actor. All they're thinking about all day and they're trained in is to try to take advantage of a human then put in a technical control. We would recommend, obviously, putting in a Demutari voice traffic filter to help protect the humans. Of it, so where are we on the regulatory front? Because the FCC, you know, two years ago was supposed to solve this problem and they've been unable to tackle all the issues you raised. So, what should we expect moving forward from the regulators, from the, you know, the FCC? Did you hear the sigh? I mean, it was, it really is one of those things where the government is trying to help, obviously. They passed and you're referencing the TRACED Act, right? Where, you know, there's new rules in place, more regulations around this. But, you know, the regulators just haven't been affected in controlling robocalls and unwanted calls because the technology that the bad actors are using are more advanced and more sophisticated. But part of it too is that these are U.S. regulations and many of those nuisance and nefarious calls are coming in from overseas. So, it's gonna take a while before there's a global standard to help police these calls. And of course, there's the fear of the regulators themselves. Even though they're being asked, right? They're asking carriers to start blocking these calls. There's serious penalties for a telephone carrier if they block the wrong call. I mean, they aren't in the business to stop and calls and they don't want the liability. They wanna stay in safe harbor. So, and we hope these regulations ultimately prevent the calls and we support all the legislation. That's gotta be clear. But, you know, you have to put in a voice firewall, something like the Mutari voice traffic filter. And it's just like the technology to protect against the email attacks, right? I mean, although the technology is different, the analogy holds true. Email spam filters are a mainstay in a layered security framework. Even though there are many, many regulations in place, we're still getting email spam. And we know that those regulations are in place as well for decades, but it's still happened. So we wish them luck, but we're here to help companies stop these calls. I just love that. What a great job Chuck that you did too of telling us the necessity of Mutari and how it really does help our enterprises just perform better and not be so scared and vulnerable. So we can pick up our phones once again. But now let's just move over to learning more about Chuck French at the professional, the individual, what makes you tick. So we have a fun little section here where we ask you some rapid fire questions. And you can just think of the first thing that pops to mind in your response back. And don't be embarrassed. We're live, so we'll make fun of you. Any terrible answers, so we'll be here for you. I appreciate that. Thank you. And we'll have to do like a red button approach. Like I did at MSNCC back in the day, it's like an Evan button. Like, oh, what is that? What's going on, the noise comes on over, no. I'm writing myself right now. I'm writing. Okay. All right, so, hey, you know, the holidays just passed, Valentine's Day coming up. What is an upcoming purchase that you were thinking about? Well, I hope my wife doesn't get ahold of this, but I've been, I'm usually, I'm usually someone who's like the first person to adopt the technology. Anything that gets me an advantage, I usually get. So I was always, you know, whatever the latest phone is and so forth, but I've been really late to the game on getting an electric car. So that's, I mean, I just really late to the game. It's, you know, it's helped a little bit too, that the recent price drop in Teslas, that helps a lot, but it's totally out of character for me. You know, I'm not the mainstream pragmatic technology. I'm the person who's that innovator, the person who's on the bleeding edge, but it's taken me a long time, but I think I'm finally there. So the whole thing's strange for me, but it's the thing I've been thinking about a lot. Oh, I'm so excited that you said it. One, of course, sustainability being a big thing about me, but I have been a Tesla owner for several years now and I'll tell you, there is nothing better. Why don't you get in at night, plugging your car in, getting up in the morning, knowing you're totally recharge, you don't have to stop at a gas station, which is very dodgy around in some neighborhoods, I have to say, and not worrying about the gas prices and just, you know, knowing that. Okay, rub it in, you people with your electric vehicles I don't have one yet, Evan. Totally worth it, totally worth it. My gas guzzler, but yeah, I love it. We have to do a show and see what you end up buying in the end. We're gonna do celebrity look-alikes. I'm trying to see which celebrity you might look like. I have a couple ideas, but who would say you, Chuck? Is there one that everyone says, wow, you really look like X? Every Halloween and Christmas, there's an easy one. And it comes through in an outfit I typically wear, because I like people, make people smile, but you guys familiar with Buddy the Elf? Buddy the Elf! Yeah, so I get, there's a certain Will Ferrell vibe about me that it comes through even more so when I'm dressed up, right, as Buddy the Elf. And God, I don't know, it's the size, like, you know, I'm like six, three, six, four. I've got a big smile, I use it frequently. And, but it transports over that. And I'm kind of embarrassed by that. I wish I could jump out and say it's Brad Pitt, but I can't, you know? It's like Frank the Tank in old school, or Ron Burgundy that all fits in with me and Will Ferrell coming through. So I'm a little bit embarrassed about that one, but I don't, I can't pick another one. No, I love that one. And no one has ever said that. So, original, very original. This is what it is. I kind of love a picture of you in that outfit too, kind of. It's something, it's something. When you can stop in the street, when you're walking around on Halloween, so for people to take pictures, you know you're landing with the outfit. And it goes seasonal, it goes right to Christmas, you know? Just keep wearing it. Which leads me to my next fire, rapid fire question. What favorite holiday do you like to celebrate? It's an easy one for me. It's always, always Thanksgiving, every time. Everyone can celebrate it. You know, not that I don't like presents, but there's not involved. There's some scheduled downtime, great for reflection, so much to be thankful for. So, and I don't think any of us take enough time to recognize that, so not nearly enough. So that's it for me. I know Jamie's favorite holiday is Valentine's Day. She gets so many roses from all of the admirers, just like the entire room that gets full of roses. But we'll save that for next episode. Chuck, really great to chat with you. It's great to see the solution I was not aware of having been in the voice industry for so long and solving a real world problem. I like practical solutions to real problems, so. And I heard you'll be in person at Enterprise Connect. I'll be there. Would be great to grab a coffee and talk more about cybersecurity, voice, and more. We'll make that happen. Have a nice discussion with you. Jamie, thank you so much. Of course. And oh my gosh, Chuck, thank you. Valuable insight, plus love to see, show everyone the amazing person you are individually too. As well as Mutari, the organization. All right, guys, if you enjoyed today's Data Movers podcast, as much as we did, please be sure to check us out at jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes releasing every other week on Wednesday mornings. And we're still on Twitter. Jay Scott, Owen Evan-Curstell, please see us there. And we always engage and follow back. So thanks, everyone. Thank you guys. And as always, happy networking.