 My name is Kyle Wallstead, I'm a Senior Solutions Architect with Ignite and happy to be here. And for folks that don't aren't familiar with Ignite, why don't you give us kind of the elevator pitch? Absolutely, I think it helps with a lot of things. Ultimately we are a content services platform. We help organizations migrate file servers to the cloud. We help them integrate with other kind of best in class applications that they're using, whether that's teams or DocuSign or Salesforce, the likes. And we help companies govern their content, understand what they have and where they have it through things like automated classification, define personally identifiable information or various elements of machine learning to look at usual user patterns and detect and alert unusual user patterns and all kinds of great smart things with files like that. You know, so some people may be familiar with the Ignite logo even if they've not heard the name before. If you go into because you guys just were added not too long ago as one of the native cloud storage options in Microsoft Teams, for example. So if you go into Teams and you go into files or you're at a tab or going to files and want to connect to another cloud storage option, Ignite is one of just a handful of the native experiences that are there within Teams to be able to add and expand that in there. One of the things I think was the most compelling stories for Ignite and then we'll kind of jump to our topic, but was the because a problem for a lot of organizations is that they have content across multiple silos and you know, where speaking of Teams, what's great about Teams is you have the ability to go and provide visibility into each of those, but there's it's kind of a I mean, it's just it's an over the top. There's no other management. There's no there's no value add other than I have five tabs to five different content silos of these other third party solutions, but there's no value out on top of that other than providing a tab a link into that. Whereas, you know, you can actually manage all of that through Ignite. So if you have Teams and this happens often when organizations go through an acquisition and they come in with options that are available and you don't want to slow people down working, but you want as an administrator of that organization, you want to be able to have some oversight, some management, some level of control and oversight over that content around those disparate systems and Ignite provides a lot of that. Yeah, absolutely. I think I think a big application is become other repository where files end up living. And like you said, it doesn't really add value. You're not logging into Teams and using Teams. It's got the best system. You're using that way to connect with people. And that's what it's fantastic for. And a byproduct of that is when you're connecting with people, when you're collaborating, often you're within Teams. It's not important to do so. But as you pointed out, there end up being silos of content behind that, whether it's new SharePoint sites being created each time there's a new team. And it's really that sprawl of content that keeps people like CIOs up at night sometimes understanding or not understanding the risk that their data carries, where are their PII files. But then it also creates a lot of differences around collaboration where you might be collaborating with four different teams on the same collective document at different phases in that document's lifecycle, for example, or throughout different workflows. And rather than copying that content into four separate locations, Ignite allows organizations to have that single source of truth, use Teams for what it's built for, and have native access to your files, but also actually considerably more capabilities that you can do with those files. Yeah, it's you brought up the topic of sprawls is what we wanted to talk about today. I was thinking about this, so just as well, so having partnered with Ignite and writing a white paper, which should be out pretty soon here, but on the topic, I was been thinking about some of my experiences and my path into the knowledge management space. So I started my career, so well, started my career. Years ago, a few years into my career, I went to work for the phone company for Pacific Bell based in the San Francisco Bay Area. And a lot of the data warehouse systems, and I was a project manager that owned a lot of the front end applications into these massive data sets. And one of the problems I started realizing as I owned helped shape the creation of a portal, a centralized entry point for a lot of our reports and systems and tools was that every time that there was a reorg and I just I noticed this that we're shifting things around and moving content around and having to recreate and clean up a lot of things. And I was constantly chasing people said, you know, hey, we have all of these other activities and things. What do we do with them? It's like, you know, I don't know, well, should we purge them? No, we don't know what we need to do with this data. And yet space at that time was very finite in the mid 90s. It was expensive to keep all that. So I was constantly chasing people to clean things up. A major shift that's happened over the last two decades has been, of course, as the cost of storage has dropped down. And then people just stopped throwing any content, purging content at all. And there's introduces other problems. But then the systems that we deploy. And so Microsoft 365 is a great example of that when we talk about sprawl. It generates with the creation of a new Office 365 group. It creates assets across multiple workloads. It creates a SharePoint team. It creates those assets. It could create, you know, a Yammer community. It creates, of course, in exchange, the shared mailbox, the calendar. So all of these components in a plan or plan as well, kind of all of those pieces that are created. And then every other new channel that you create in teams, every additional team that you create on your tenant, all of that creates all of these assets that build out, and out, and out, and out. And I rarely hear about people talking about, well, I do hear from administrators the concern of content that's proliferating in multiple directions. And what are the best practices? What do we do about all of that? Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I think it, I think it impacts, you know, multiple kind of people and multiple roles. And like you say, you know, a lot of times administrators carry the biggest burden. You know, users, they want to just be able to kind of work how they see fit, and not have to choose, you know, what to use for what purpose and this and that. And I think what you just described is a disjointed enterprise environment that a lot of organizations fall into. You know, they have all kinds of different tools being used for different purposes. You know, even if it's all kind of within Microsoft, they end up with, like you say, all these different groups and SharePoint and teams and OneDrive and, you know, Yammer and so forth, you know, and it becomes very disjointed, right? Whereas, you know, I think, I think where Ignite really excels is bringing simplicity into that environment, you know, both for administrators but also in many cases just for end users. You know, we've migrated file servers to the cloud and integrated it with Ignite without telling end users, right? You know, they left on a Friday and their S drive was mapped to their file server that was on premise before. Now they come back in on Monday, their same S drive mapped to the same data, etc. And I had a pleasure of, well, I've had the pleasure of working with, you know, many hundreds, if not thousands of administrators and customers over the last 10 years working with Ignite. But one in particular, I'm thinking of, I was just sort of a funny guy and he set up a training for his end users. And he had rolled out Ignite three weeks earlier and sets up this training and, you know, brings people in. And the first thing he says is, okay, guys, how does everyone like using Ignite? They're like, what are you talking about? This is the Ignite training. We have no idea what Ignite, you know, and he wanted to take that point because at his company, a lot of people are hesitant to learn yet a new application, right? And so what he wanted to give them the confidence of is, no, your mapped drive is going to work how it always has. You're going to be able to have, you know, all kinds of links in your Excel files. They were actually a engineering firm. So all the CAD drawings are going to be able to, you know, preserve those references to, you know, other drawings and a lot of applications and files are designed to be able to work off of a path to that content, a UNC path, a file server location. And, you know, so all of those things are going to work with Ignite. And in those same folders that you have a mapped drive to, now appear to you within teams, or you can save to them through teams, or you can invite an external user to be able to collaborate. And what that does is it does a couple of things. So first of all, it prevents the need to duplicate content. So a lot of times you might have engineers working off the file server, and then when they're ready to share that with a subcontractor, they take it off the file server, put it into a sharing solution, and send it off. And then they might collaborate on it there. Well, it still lives on the file server. If you ever need to make changes and have the engineers, you know, fix some part of it, now you've got changes being made in multiple places, and mistakes are made of people working off of the wrong file, all kinds of kind of challenges associated with that, that, you know, duplication. But what it also, the other side of it is, you should be able to use whatever tool you want, right? If you're not particularly tech savvy and you like working from your letter drive, boom, all your folders are right there. If you live and breathe in your CRM, because you're a client director, and you're, you know, always in dynamics, and you're kind of, you should be living there, because that's where you do your work, you should have access to those same folders that your finance team and your legal team are using. So when you save a, you know, a contract into that CRM, it's the same location that the finance user is doing. And that bringing those worlds together, allowing users to work, however they see fit, but centralizing your content is really kind of the story that Ignite kind of tells. And many Ignite users have no idea that they're using Ignite, which is I think a pretty powerful statement. You know, there's something that you said just kind of triggered me, triggered a memory there, but you know, one of the mistakes that are made in largely IT-led deployments and new technology, they'll go and do the assessment. They've identified, hey, this is going to make us compliant, more secure, it's going to unify, do all these things. But when they break the methods, the familiarity that people have end users have with like here, my business systems, this is the way that I work. And when you force them into this new way of working, people push back against that. And so one of the best paths to, and we talk a lot about adoption and engagement and what those actually mean inside your organization, adoption does not mean, hey, everybody can log into the new tool and success because people can log in. No, it's actually adoption. Again, you define what that means, but adoption means that people are actually in there, they're trained and that they are at least back to that baseline of how they were working prior to that deployment. True improvements of engagement is above that baseline. You know, what are people actually doing? How are we generating more intellectual property, more content in there? Are we, is the quality of what we're producing improving with these things? And so you can't, that's the mistake that IT organizations make as they look at it purely from the technology standpoint and not at how people are actually working. And so that's why I kind of, that's an important aspect of that, is fitting in with whatever you're doing from that end user perspective. Because if they're not using it, it's not successful. Yeah. And I thought that that's kind of why I thought this guy, I mean, his name is Yusuf. I'll leave his company off because I didn't talk to him ahead of time. But that's why I thought Yusuf was so great when he kind of approached it in that way and brought them into the training and told them or asked them how they liked using Ignite. And you know, because he sort of ensured 100% adoption on day one, right? Was just, hey look, we're not really improving anything yet, but that's fine, right? He was laying the foundation. Meanwhile, yeah, all the content was backed up. He didn't have to do the old school backup things and, you know, until people were using it, he still had people have the VPN and things like that. But then after the training, now he's able to shut down VPN. He's able to do these other things. He's able to integrate it with their Microsoft 365 environment and all those sorts of details. But that's why I thought it was such a brilliant kind of technique. And again, I joke because he's just a funny guy. But it's also a really, really smart approach, I thought, because, you know, inevitably, you've always got some sort of, you know, you've got certain people that are going to be really excited about the next new thing and other people that are just going to be frustrated about it, right? So if you can, if you can please both provide the, you know, the newest, latest, greatest, best in class applications, allowing people to be as productive as possible while not breaking anything or forcing the other, you know, half of your staff that that's less eager to learn a new tool or, you know, things like that, you know, then again, I think that's really powerful. Well, it's the, I mean, there's an ongoing problem again in the Microsoft 365 space. But I mean, other platforms have a similar problem where you have a lot of competing tools or overlapping functionality is this which tool to use when and that when you're introducing something, the more that you can integrate that in again into those business habits into the way that people are working, whether you're going in and automating, you're creating, you know, workflows in the back end, they're not familiar with it. It's, you know, I used to just, you know, send an email off to Stephanie and who would handle this? Well, now that anything routed, she's got an automation or email that anything that comes in with that request automatically kicks off triggers some workflow and does a response while she's still asleep, you know, those kinds of automations. But that's around your content. It's also important. If I have to worry about, okay, this document, where am I saving this up into? And what are the next steps with that? Oh, and because it's over in this other system, that doesn't have some of the automation that will go in and tag it properly, I have to go in and classify and tag it because it's over in this system or on this project. I mean, end users just they can't sustain that. So you have to, I mean, having centralized content, like I've been involved in portals and knowledge management, information management systems for the majority of my career. And everybody runs towards the light of that promise of, you know, one location, one version of the truth of the content that used to be SharePoints, one of their main lines, one version of the truth. And then SharePoints silo, silo, silo, all these different locations. Yeah. I mean, I think the, I think there's two sides of it, right? And, you know, on the one side, I sit here and say, hey, simplify everything, centralize everything, it should be an ignite, but you should be able to use all these other tools, right? And, and, you know, and I think that's important from a strategy perspective to have, you know, have a location, especially where your most sensitive content should live, have a location where as you archive, you know, content, you know, shut down old teams, locations, okay, what do you do with that content, those assets? How do you manage the life cycle of it? You know, and again, having strategy around that and having some kind of, you know, again, direction on those lines, but the fact of the matter is, it's an uphill battle if you were to say, hey, only store files in this one location, right? And there's going to be edge cases that pop up, there's going to be details around kind of why an end user is going to want to kind of store files in a certain way or, you know, no matter how great you make secure link sharing, somebody's going to have a reason why they need to send something as an attachment, right? You know, and again, blocking- There's never a reason for somebody to send something as an attachment, come on. I haven't sent an attachment in years, but, you know, for some reason, you find people that still feel it necessary. I suppose technically in my signature line, I have an image that is attached to every single one of my emails, so, you know, again. That's an allowable use case, yeah. But, you know, oh, okay, oh, I tried to send it to them, they had trouble downloading the link, whatever. Okay, you know, again, the fact of the matter is you should be guiding people, you should be encouraging the use of, you know, certain tools, you know, certain processes, et cetera, but you should also be able to view and govern content regardless of where it lives, right? If somebody spins up a new team and is storing files in that team, which, you know, are actually in the document library that gets created for the corresponding SharePoint site, you know, Ignite is not here to say, shame on you, you shouldn't do that ever, et cetera, right? But, you know, what we are here to do is help give that company visibility into what is where, you know, and how their different content is classified, right? If that is a, let's put it this way, the regulatory bodies don't care if it's stored in, you know, SharePoint or if it's stored in Ignite as long as it's secure and the right number of people have access to it, when that's highly sensitive, you know, personally identifiable information or credit card data, et cetera, they could care less as long as you know what it is, where it is, that you can find it and you can prove that only the right people have access to it. And that's where kind of our governance angle really comes into play. So, on the one side, we can help simplify and centralize content, but on the other side, we can give you a single pane of glass and a lens into all these other repositories to really help you kind of, you know, secure and govern your content. You know, I think it's a fairly easy case to make when you talk about, hey, look, there's like someone leaves a company and if their content is spread across you, your intellectual property is spread across a dozen different locations, having to go in, if you can even gain access to some of those locations as the company to go to there, there's one use case, I think people understand, or when you have, you have to put a legal hold, you have to go and do that discovery process. You have to go through as part of a compliance and you'll search through that content. Again, it makes it very difficult when, you know, half or more of your content spread across these different tools are not accessible by those compliance tools. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a company to say, look, you can have it in different tools, in different organizations, as long as they comply with, here are legal requirements for content and the life cycle of that content. But I think that, you know, there's two kind of scenarios, which I think it's a clear cut, you know, defense of having this overarching governance and having that kind of single view of content. Where the long tail is, this is my pure opinion now, that's fact. My opinion now is that the long tail of where content is and I would say, you know, content and it's a blend of personal and company content, but on that should be within company assets, but most of the interactions that we have, conversations that we have, you know, documents or mockups that are shared in different locations. So unstructured content spread across these different locations that a company doesn't have access to. The problem there is that there's no learning as our systems get smarter, more automation. You have like Microsoft working on Project Cortex, for example, and Project Cortex for those that aren't familiar with it. The idea is to use artificial intelligence to use, you know, the ability for the system to go in the AI to learn from the patterns within the content and the conversation and what's stored wherever they're stored and to be able to surface that up to the right people at the right time. I mean, that's the benefit that's lost. We're not going to have those opportunities for that discovery moment. To find those patterns, to look at it, we're going to lose some of that knowledge as the systems get more intelligent. It will be, it's, what is it called? I'm trying to remember when I did, went through business school and there's a phrase for that for essentially the cost of a lost opportunity. And I, you know, there's actually, I used to know how to do the calculation. I had one of those HP12C calculators and we're going in there for something you'd be able to go in and actually, as part of that, I have to say that I got a B plus in that class. I wasn't the expert in that managerial finance. But actually being able to go in and calculate, you know, what is, because we didn't do this thing, because we didn't have this content, this is what it cost us. It's, it's, it's hard to do that. It's hard to think about, but it's kind of like in a collaboration system. You have a hundred people that have access to a collaboration platform. If only 20 people are actively in there on a daily basis doing things, your lost opportunity is what is it, what, what could we accomplish if the other 80 were all also in there actively participating? Sharing ideas, learning from each other. The, you know, it's, you know, so that's, that's what I was talking about. I think that's where a lot of the lost, the lost opportunity, the lost intellectual property that, that companies are not realizing are gone because they're not thinking in those terms. Yeah. No, and I think it's, I think we're starting to see businesses kind of evolve or respond in terms of different kind of threats that are out there or different new kind of privacy acts that seem to be popping up in every, every different state or will probably eventually become national or, you know, different countries around the globe and, you know, organizations are starting to realize that they need to kind of think about their data in some new ways, right? And, you know, and you see things out in the news around this breach or that breach, you know, a few hundred million dollar fine here, you know, this that, you know, whatever and some of it feels kind of abstract, you know, but and maybe, maybe certain businesses feel like, oh, I could fly under the radar. I'm not going to be as big of a target as, you know, some large company. Yet on the same side, you know, maybe smaller businesses are are the biggest, you know, at risk to something like ransomware or something that could kind of take them out and they just had a client that happened to the beginning of this year. Yeah. And it's, you know, not a massive company. And you think, why would they be targeted as like, you know, it can happen to anybody and they were stuck. And yeah, it's so it's it's happening more and more frequently. And I think, you know, when you think about like the the chance of a breach or reducing this risk, right? You know, I think about a handful of different things. First of all, the number one thing that everybody's got to do is use two factor login for for all your systems. I mean, the number one way accounts are compromised is is through their passwords, right? That's that's the number one way to improve the security of any system using two factor login. So I can't kind of preach that enough. But then the other side of it is kind of, all right, well, you know, the, you know, the value of a file, if it were to be, you know, compromised, right? And the chance of that file being compromised, right? So the way to reduce that, right, you don't want to reduce the value of the file itself. You know, but what you can do is understand the value that that file has. And you can understand and minimize the number of people that have access to it at different stages in its life, right? And that is the kind of number two way, so to speak, to reduce the risk that your content carries, right? So turn on two factor. And second of all, you know, be able to understand your data and minimize who have access to it along the way. So a lot of times, you know, people think of archiving as a cost savings exercise. And that could certainly be one value add to it, you know, if something hasn't been accessed in six months, put it into cheaper storage. But the more critical part of that is you're reducing the number of people that have access to it. So many systems, you know, once it's stored there and whoever has access, it's going to be there as long as those people are with the company, as new people come on board, they'll get access to some folder with files that haven't been accessed in, you know, in six years, eight years, 10 years, whatever. And you've got all these people going back to what you were saying about not deleting things, not cleaning it up, because, you know, the cost of storage is cheaper, and it's just building up and up and up over time. So having the ability to have the number of people that have access to a document minimized, particularly throughout that document's life cycle, right, is, you know, a crucial thing that I think it's a practice not a lot of businesses have been doing historically over the last, you know, 10 plus years, but certainly those are the conversations that I'm having with a lot of forward-thinking CIOs over the last maybe 18 months. I've seen a big interest in being able to manage the life cycle of documents and really control and limit who has access to different documents throughout in order to minimize their exposure. Well, this is a, it's an important topic. It's just, it's interesting that, I mean, I remember having similar conversations towards the beginning of my career, the manager who is, you know, where we talked about, in fact, we had one specific conversation. We were talking about the limited access to some of the data sets. Of course, we were, we own a data warehouse, and so very, just a handful of people that had access to go in and query directly against the, you know, the data that was there, and so we had kind of, Mark's, we had, you know, subsets of the data that they could go in, but we were constantly fielding requests, well, I really need this data, I need to look at it this way, and how that kind of expanded into more document-centric collaboration, but kind of, as you talked about, in a similar way, you almost had, you know, caretakers or librarians that managed a lot of that, that access, and as things were archived and closed off and moved, moved around, you still made it possible for, in some of these organizations for, for people to go in and do a search and to find the results, but they couldn't then get into those results without going through a couple steps, and so I think it makes sense for organizations to be thinking about, you know, with the types of content, where their content is located. Again, I think it's important to say that the right way forward is not just to go and shut down all of these, you know, small third-party tools and systems, if that's going to... I'm going to make friends. Right, right, the other thing is that, you know, I always say that, you know, people and users are like, you know, like water running downhill, you place a rock in front of them to stop them from doing something, they just run right around you. You have to be focused on, well, what are they trying to accomplish? What's the way that they're working? Sometimes it's a, hey, just need to educate you that we have these other tools that are compliant. They do the exact same thing, and is it an education, you know, thing to steer clear of the word re-education? It doesn't have positive connotations, but, you know, educate them on what's out there, or when, hey, there's a valid use case for why they're using a non-supported technology, and maybe that's something we, as a company, we need to be aware of it, provide some oversight, potentially bring it into the fold and support it to meet those scenarios, but at least you're having that conversation with end users about it, and you're, that, if you're listening and supporting your end users in the way that they need to work, you're more able then to go in and have those broader governance discussions as an organization say, here's what we need to do, we're seeing these patterns, these problems, here's what we're looking to do to change, and you can have then a dialogue around that. When people are involved in that kind of dialogue and that process change, they're more likely to support that, and results, because they'll be heard, they may not agree with all of the decisions made, but when they're participants within that, and when it's, they're listened to, and when it's justified, here's why we're doing that, they're like, yeah, you know what, all right, I need to go in and do that, and you're more likely to see people change. Yeah, I mean, generally what I, what I find is, users, they don't want to break company policy, they don't want to be out of compliance, that's not, they're not rebels at nature, at their core, right? They want to be generally rule followers. They want to get their work done. But yeah, and that's the thing, and they know that there's a better way to do it. And I think that's what, another trend that we're seeing is, users are really educated with what is out there and how they can get things done, and there's consumer, there's free consumer tools that have wild productivity gains, right? And so people are, I mean, my grandma is using online tools all the time, and this and that nowadays. And she knows how to call her Uber, and she knows how to find me on FaceTime or this or that. People know how to connect, they know how to use technology, they know it's out there, and they want to just get their work done. So being able to give them a way to efficiently get their work done, while also being in compliance with both your company and regulatory policies, again, is sort of a win-win. They're not trying to break the rules just to break the rules, they just know there's a better way to work than whatever tool you're forcing down their throat. So anyway, that's definitely good advice is to listen to your users, let them be a part of the decisions, help them understand why maybe something can't be supported, and help them find an alternative that really meets their requirement. Yeah, and the only thing I would add there is just, again, my personal opinion on this is to err on the side of the end user's judgment, because at the end of the day, they're the front line, they know what they need to get done, and while, again, may need to re-educate them on this better way of doing things or introduce new technology, you can't do those things and interrupt or stop the work from being done. And so I'd say like, listen, have some empathy for what they're trying to accomplish and have a conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think that's by doing that, you know, IT organizations can really drive a lot of value into their businesses, you know, and be a strategic organization within your business, help the different kind of business stakeholders achieve more, accomplish more. And again, I think that relationship changes, you know, I've seen it a number of different times where, you know, if you can, if you can empower those users, then the entire relationship between your business and kind of the IT organization within that business, you know, can be flipped on its head and can, you know, and that's such a, I mean, it's a very different story when the whole business sees you as, you know, a strategic branch driving the business forward and encouraging growth. And, you know, and again, all that, all you really need to do is just, you know, understand, listen to, and empower your users to make that flip. You know, just to end note here, when I was working from Microsoft as an employee, it was, there's, of course, there's always the internal language, some of the keywords that are used, the management speak in there. And one that I kind of joke about all the time is that when whenever you run into a problem, it's not a problem, it's an opportunity. So in that respect, for those organizations that are experiencing sprawl, it's an opportunity, both for you to get, grow closer to your end users, as well as to provide that value add, find, you know, figure out, hey, how do we, how do we actually streamline the way that we're handling all of the content across these disparate systems? There's an opportunity to shine for sure. So yeah, no, absolutely. Well, again, really, really appreciate it, Christian. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great having you. And Kyle, people want to find out more about getting touch with you or and find out more about Ignite, what are the best ways to reach you? Yeah, well, you can find me on LinkedIn, Kyle Wallstead, that's a funny spelling for the last name. It's W-A-L-L-S-T-E-D-T. That's also, I'm also available by email is K Wallstead, same last name, at Ignite, which is E-G-N-Y-T-E dot com. By all means, don't hesitate to reach out. Love to connect with you. You know, if you have any questions, you know, again, feel free to fire them my way. I'll say again, if you're using Teams, if you've gone in and added cloud storage, you might not be familiar with the Ignite name hearing it, but when you see the logo, you'd be like, oh, yeah, okay, I've seen that there. So it's definitely expanding within the Teams and Microsoft 365 universe. So Kyle, really appreciate you taking the time today. Awesome. Thanks, Christian.