 Hi, I'm Jay Fiedel, this is Think Tech, and we're doing Think Tech Tech Talks. That's not a redundancy, it's a reality. And here we are at the two o'clock rock on Tuesday with Matt Darnel. Matt is the president and CTO of Comtel Hawaii, which is a very important company on Bishop Street and through the business community doing communications and telephony. Am I right? Absolutely. Welcome to the show, Matt. Thank you for having me. Tell us about Comtel. Tell us how you got into it. Tell us what it does. You want to set the stage and see what you do all day. Absolutely. What I do, I have fun all day. All day long. If you enjoy what you do, you're not working, right? So Comtel started about 20 years ago doing base telephony type of things. My father and I started the company and it's real interesting, the evolution that we've done where we started with out of a spare bedroom in his house. Really? I love this story. I remember thinking, boy, I wish we had an office downtown. That was the ultimate goal of when we made it when we had an office downtown. So we got to go to the office downtown and that was probably 10 years ago and we've kind of moved farther and farther away from town every five years, but every week. That's where the market is. It really is. And so we have been doing those kind of things and this last iteration of what we've done, it started about a year ago, we have figured out that our business needs to change and our business as it stands is going away. And the analogy that I use with folks is it doesn't matter how much money you made or how successful you were, if you made horse and buggy carriages around the turn of the previous century, right? When those Model Ts started rolling off the assembly line, you either changed your business model or it went away. Oh, you're toast, yeah. Absolutely. So this is really an interesting issue and dilemma as a matter of fact. Because as the telecom provider, I mean, we used to sell, they used to be a telecom manager. I mean, there was someone that was their job. That's nobody's job. Unless you're a Fortune 500 company, you don't have a telecom manager. It's all under IT. And we were in a position, we were called a trusted advisor, where they wouldn't make a move without asking us, should I do this, should I do that. And about five years ago, it started happening where we call someone, they go, oh, golly, we changed our phone system. Our IT guy recommended this, so we just bought it. No different than if they recommended a backup solution or a server, that IT person displaced us as the trusted advisor. I mean, they didn't go for other quotes, they didn't even ask us, they just kind of switched over. It's a new paradigm for them. And they figure it doesn't, in this world, it's in that world. So they go to the IT guy. Yeah, and it is getting to the point that voice is just an application on the local area network. And just like printing or file sharing or email, it's sitting right there. So we started feeling back then that we had to do something. Well, about a year ago, we made a very strategic decision. And we've been doing this. We're relaunching as comtel.cloud. And that's kind of the outward manifestation. That's why we're here today, comtel.cloud. Absolutely. And we're telling people, it's a whole new comtel. We still have all the things we knew, all of our core competencies over. We've developed the last 20 years, we still have that. But now we're doing so much more. And as we have done that, we had a bunch of goals. One goal is we didn't want one server anywhere. It was either going to be in the cloud or in a data center somewhere. It's a much better arrangement. Yeah, and from our phone system, it's in our private cloud. It's not in the public. It's in a private cloud. We have that at a data center here. And we wanted to shut all off of space. That paradigm, internally, to me, 20 years ago, that's all I wanted. The office space, I felt so envious of people. Now it's 180 the other way. Absolutely. And parking and all the things associated with that. So that took a long time to plan, to think about, to talk to employees from marketing. How are our competitors going to use that against us? And that's sales people. They're the ones in the cloud. You don't need them for what's terrestrial situations. Exactly. And it used to be like phone systems where all there was wires going everywhere. And we needed a lot of technicians for that. And we needed what you call a roller truck. Somebody had to get in a truck and drive to fix something. But now, most places we go, we're not responsible for the infrastructure. We've got some little bit of handsets, which if you can plug in a lamp, you can plug these phones in. And we have one server, maybe two, in the closet. If a phone stops working, 99% of the time, it's got nothing to do with us anymore. So our need for technicians and engineers has gone down. And 95% of the times, we used to have to roll the truck to fix a problem. Now, 95% of the time, it's remote. So how do you spend your time? I'm on the beach. I'm enjoying life. I don't believe that. But quality of life is a big part of it. We have people that work at Comteldit says, if I couldn't work at home, I would have retired a long time ago. So I really feel good about that, that they're so productive. They're such an important part of our company. They provide so much good for the community that if they had to drive into town, and come into town, an hour going home, they would have retired by now. This is a company of the future. But what do you do all day? What do I do? How do they do? Yeah, absolutely. So there are, we still have to install things. So we have people that go and install, and they'll take phones and boxes and run cable and data drops, those kind of things. Within a facility and off of the river. Yeah, absolutely. So in a place like this, you want jacks around the wall, we can do that, install a network switch. But we set everything up so that we don't have to come on site to fix things when they have get wrong. So I do have kind of, I'm very active in the community from on various boards, scholarships. You have to see a Hawaii Educational Foundation on the scholarship chairman. We give about $83,000 in scholarships. So anybody in STEM that's looking for a scholarship, if you're a Hawaii resident, I encourage you to research that. From coaching football, I get to walk my son to school in the morning. And that gives me more pleasure than almost anything else I do all day. But I'm learning. I am coaching. I'm teaching. I'm going on sales calls. We're setting things up. We're rethinking how we do things. And we're bringing up a VMware form. And so VMware form would be a servers where let, right now, our cloud is just for us. So we're going to be letting other companies run their applications in our cloud that we have. It's a DDR fortress. And so with that, I mean, do we buy our own? A TDR fortress, by the way, is an amazing place. Here at the airport, it's got walls of concrete that are three feet thick. It's prepared to last in any eventuality. It's where you have co-location servers. Absolutely. It takes care of your data in a safe way. So as far as, so we do the applications for that there. So we allow people to do that. But do we buy? Do we want to do something here? Do we do it on the mainland? I mean, rack space on the mainland is a lot less expensive than rack space here in Hawaii. Why do you do it here when you can do it there? Well, we're going to be doing a hybrid. There are some things we'll talk about here with software-defined WANs that are very timing-sensitive, like voice and video. But there are other things that if an email takes an extra five seconds to get from me to you, no one is ever going to notice that. So maybe take advantage of an inexpensive cabinet and power and internet there for those types of applications. And the things that we need here on the island, we want to have close. We want to go ahead and do that. Yeah, it was a level of comfort. But let me tell you what I would call you for based on the four corners of this conversation. OK, I don't want to have an old-fashioned network, an old-fashioned PBS system. I don't know if anybody remembers that. But the PBS system kind of thing in the inter-corporate office, I want to use my cell phone. I want to use VoIP phones. I want to attach the VoIP phones to my computer. I want everything to be easy, modern, just as you say. I want to minimize the risk. I'm going to have to have trouble and pay attention to maintenance and replace things. So I call you and I say, look, I need you to give me a system plan, what I should get, what brands I should look at. And I need you to help me figure out the logic of my answering system. I mean, my reception system and my message giving and all that stuff. Email, voicemail rather, it wasn't longer. 20 years ago voicemail was a hard sell in any company. Now it's 25 maybe. But now you've got to have you have everybody as ubiquitous on every cell phone. So I want it all connected and I want the smartest possible apps to run on my VoIP phones and on my system in my company. And I want a really sweet voice answering and leaving brands on everybody. Well, if you like. They're really sweet voice. I can do that. So any of it. I want you to consult with me and give me the true path. So I don't have to do the path more than once. And I want you to tell me how I can stock the necessary equipment so that I can change the phones and I can modify the software to the extent that I would like to modify the software. And sort of leave me on a kind of an automated basis. Am I right in my expectations? So what I heard you just say is one, you want some kind of predictable cost for your technology. I kind of inferred what you were saying. You never want to hit with a big bill. Cheap. Or if it can't be cheap, predictable. Or you can budget for it. You know what it's going to be. I'm getting this value for this amount of money. Like when you consider an expensive camera, I consider ultra expensive. So there's lots of relativity in phone systems. So you want predictable IT spend. And I think that's pretty common across the board. You want something that's managed. You don't want to be responsible for this card dies or this PC dies or this server dies or something goes where all of a sudden you're faced with what do I do? There's no support for it. Do I buy something? Well, we don't have a fries down the corner. The best we got is Best Buy or Industrial Electronics. Maybe you can go there and pick something else. No, it's hard. It's very hard. They carry consumer but not business. And you can't find the stuff you need to run a business at Best Buy. Sorry, Best Buy. I love Best Buy, but not at that level. Absolutely. I mean, dating myself, I remember CompUSA had a little wall of some business-grade equipment. But that's for the most part gone. So you want those kind of things. You want mobility. You want, you know, work is an activity. It's not a place. No matter where you are, you want to be able to work. I mean, when I was waiting in the green room earlier, I was on my phone, I remote desktoped into my PC. So I was able to forward some pictures for this presentation that we didn't get earlier. So there's nothing I could have done at my office desk that I couldn't do from my phone. That's the thing. You're dealing. You say that you've got to be careful about the buggy whip phenomenon. You're saying that everybody has a cell phone. There are all these apps on cell phones. Some are native, some are, you know, $2, and they have changed the world. And then you talk about the relationship of the cell phone and the computer and all that. And that is also, you know, you give leverage to both of those things that expands that world. Then the question is, with all of that, with all that cell phone tech, where you don't need to go to Hawaii and Telcom anymore, you don't need it. And people, you know, by the thousands, I believe, or at least by the hundreds, are giving up landlines here these days. They don't need them because they have a cell phone with them all the time. And so given that, given the computer, the laptop usually, right, and the cell phone, why do I need Comtel? Absolutely. So you still need, even if you have a lot of automated things, a lot of things to run them. So there's always going to be changes that need to do. There are always going to be some kind of issue. Some of the times I think, you know, I wish all this stuff was easier. The other half, I think, I mean, if it was easier, I would be out of a job, right? And cell phones used to be a very complicated thing. You know, where you had coverage, which care you wanted to go with, how many SMSes, I mean, you paid per text message, those types of things. And now it's just, you don't need a consultant to help. I mean, there used to be people that would look at your phone bill and figure out where you're overpaying, and they just got a percentage of... I remember that. It wasn't that long ago either. That was a business, right? But now it's flat rate, here we go. You know, we get this many minutes or a share. So some things are getting a lot simpler. And that's what has enabled us to grow, to identify that, to take the good and make that work for the benefit of the people. And as far as who I tell ghosts, I mean, we need who I tell me. There needs to be some glue holding together, all that from E911 to all that interconnect between all the carriers, that type of thing. So they'll always have a place, but I don't think it will be with landline telephones. I have a Hawaiian tell at home for internet and TV, and I'm very happy with that. I don't have a landline, that's for sure. And there are issues, I mean, with my small children. I mean, do we know, how do they down 911 if they have problems? I mean, that's a little bit off the beat track. But so there are, I'm happy to talk to people about that. I mean, what are their pros and cons of getting rid of a landline? I mean, it's not for everyone, my mother-in-law. Don't answer that yet, because we're gonna take a short break, Matt. This is Matt Dardell. He's the president and CTO of Contel, Hawaii. And when we come back from this break, we're gonna talk about the pros and cons of giving up your landline in the year 2017 and the 21st century. We'll be right back. It's me, Angus McTech. Wishing you to welcome and join us to see us on Hibachi Talk on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join my co-hosts, Gordo the Texard and Andrew the Security Guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech and we'll have some wee bit of fun. And remember, let your wing gang free, where area be. Aloha. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Chang, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. We'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. I told you we'd come back and we did, like MacArthur. Okay, that's Matt Darnell. He's the president and CTO of Contel, Hawaii. Matt, so the cliffhanger, who's so excited about this. What are the pros and cons of giving up your landline here? Yeah, and for obviously for different people, it has different applications. And two people that are near and dear to me. So my mother, she does a lot of faxing, right? And voiceover IP and faxing don't go well taken together. You know, you need special equipment and different protocols. And so she likes to fax, she gets a lot of faxes. So for a landline that is the single most reliable way to make and receive faxes from a fax machine that you buy Costco. Hard wire. Hard wire, absolutely. So for her, that is the difference between having a home phone and not having a home phone. Where my mother-in-law doesn't really like cell phones and technology and cell phones she takes out when she thinks she might need it for a trip. But otherwise it's just put away in the desk and she just wants a home phone. So I mean, it does kind of break down that way that there is a real generational gap. That if you look at who has a landline, it's people that grew up with a landline, that have a landline. I know people that if I call them without texting them first to ask them if I can call them, I mean, that's an insult. So they're not used to having a landline. We were at a hotel on a vacation last summer and we had two adjoining rooms, one for my wife and myself, one for my two boys. And they had never used a kind of phone where you lift it up and you get a dial tone. And I kid you not, for 20 minutes, they were calling back, call me, call me, call me. And they're back and forth. There was such a revelation to them that you pick it up and you hear something and then you put numbers in and you don't hit send and their whole life has been cell phones and that type of communication. Change the world. And the iPhone is what, barely eight years old or something like that. Think about 10, I think this is a 10 year anniversary. It's not much. So it's changed our society everywhere in the world. It's changed our psychology, our sociology. It's changed the way we do business. Really amazing. Steve Jobs wasn't kidding. This was totally disruptive. And Query, will it continue to be disruptive? Probably yes. So to the extent that you want to avoid the buggy whip syndrome, you have to keep on moving. Absolutely. You have to keep ahead of it. And what a trend that we see today that I don't think has really hit Hawaii because we're kind of insulated and we don't have a lot of choice as far as carriers go is this software-defined WAN. And WAN's wide area network. Wide area network, a local area network is what happens within your four walls. A wide area network is generally how you would connect to someone outside of your walls. It might be your own company or it might be the internet or it could be salesforce.com or Gmail or anywhere outside your global organization or your staff is in India, for example. Absolutely. And so it doesn't really matter where you are. And those got started about in the mid-80s. There were things like x.25 and frame relay which you might remember those terms. I'm too young for that. You're too far too young. And they were expensive. They were from this point to that point. It was like a hose. What went in one side came out the other side and vice versa. Very little intelligence built into the network and took a long time to install. Extremely, extremely complicated. But then the internet happened. And all of a sudden people needed to get outside to this what's the world wide web? HTML, why do I have to type www? Because you can answer any question you can ask. That's why. It can't today. And so then they had two connections. They had one connecting two sites together and then one connection going out to the world. And that was just very hard, very even more complicated and very expensive. So then the technology called VPN, a virtual private network happened where I have some internet connection and you have some internet connection and we can make a tunnel between us through the internet which is wide open. I mean, that's just gunfight, shoot them out, whatever you have right there. Anything goes on the internet. You can't control that. But we can connect to each other. So our email is encrypted. If you have a software package that I need to utilize, again it's secure between us and we're not tied to any particular carrier. You could get carrier A, I could get carrier B and we could be anywhere. This makes me think that we should look at your photos. Am I right? Absolutely. So we want to go ahead and do that. So this is an example of a two, two, two branches of the same organization and they have this we call SD-WAN, software defined WAN and you hear that a lot, that term SD something and that just means we're separating the software from the hardware. We're a common example we all know is a cash register. When you put a square, which is the credit card reader on an iPad, that is now, the iPad is now a software defined cash register because I've just taken some generic hardware and I've made software, how have it be something else? So we have this generic hardware and we can have multiple carriers that connect to the same location and I can do all kinds of things from buffer to meaning that I can slow things down and speed things up. So if I have two connections, like if we had in that image, what it allows me to do is A, I have two connections, I want all of my internet traffic to go over one connection and all of my email traffic to go over the other connection but this device is smart enough that hey, if link A is slow, it'll move traffic over to link B and have that kind of technology. Now you as a, I just said integrator, would know the pieces and you'd be able to analyze how they would fit together and how they would serve a given business or situation from the point of view of functionality and connectivity and for that matter, security. All those things would play in your analysis and your recommendations to your clientele and I take it from what you say that you can be, although certainly Apple has been very innovative in this and so has Samsung for that matter, although once in a while they get into a little tiff about who invented it first but in any event they've been very innovative and what I take from your comments is that people like you, innovators, I mean integrators can be innovative too. You can find the ways to do this in a efficient way, a secure way and great connectivity and functionality dedicated to a certain kind of business or operation and that's where your creativity comes in, am I right? That's very true. I mean, every business is different. Every business has unique challenges but there are some constants. Everything we talked about that you want, I think every business should strive for. The lowest cost for the biggest bang for the buck and they wanna have something that's manageable, they wanna have something that's consistent, something that's gonna work and what we can do is we're not tied to any particular carrier, any particular technology. If somebody has something and they need, I need to do X, Y, and Z, we can find the right technology. I mean there are some large, they start with Cisco, that anything with the Cisco brand on it, it works great. If it's got that stamp on that. It's not a fraudulent copy of the Cisco brand, that happens too, yeah. Absolutely right, but if it has Cisco on there, then it's good that they sell it. Well we have more of a best of breed where we wanna look at the switching system. What's the best for that? What's the best for that? Reliability and all that stuff. Absolutely, cost, manageability, the company behind it, doing all those kinds. So if I take this advice and you give me reliable and long lasting equipment, then I'm gonna be better off and that's really the value added you provide for me. But let me ask you this question. Hawaii has been courting the possibility of being a call center for all since statehood. And we had one or two over the years. They never worked out. But if I come to you as a guy who can integrate all this and I say, Matt, build me a call center. Make it the most efficient call center you can. Make it better than anything in the Philippines or in India. Make it sort of an American icon kind of call center that will do it the way they used to do it when America was great. You remember that before? America's great. America's great. We're gonna make America great in telecommunications. Absolutely. So the question is, can you give me that now? Can you find, can you integrate equipment, including cell phone equipment and computer equipment and wide area network equipment that will allow me to have the most terrific call center right here? And Bishop, can you do that? Absolutely. But the challenge with that is with today's technology, you don't have to be a single place. I mean, we used to call follow the sun call centers. And Hawaii was very nice because we have business hours with Tokyo and also with New York City. It's one of the few places you can be in the United States and be able to say that. But we could, using the technology, you can have small pockets. So geography kinds of issues don't happen. A distributed call center. Absolutely. Everywhere. So could we do what you asked for? Absolutely. Would it make a lot of sense? And this is where, I get that a lot. People tell me, this is what I want. Make me this. And we say, wow. I understand that's what you want. But let's talk about why you want that. See, whether you should really want that. And what some of the other options are not, I'm not talking about outsourcing. Your employees, you control them, but maybe you have something in New York or somewhere on the East Coast that when people call it two in the morning in Hawaii, you have something bright-eyed, bushy-tailed that's already on their fourth cup of coffee to be able to do that. Let me ask you this though. We only have a minute left. So I'd like you to address the audience, that camera. Okay? So what should Hawaii do? Hawaii needs to be at the front end. We have to be relevant. We take advantage of our special geographical position in Pacific and with the straddle time zones and all that. And with guys like you who can integrate all this technology and make it work in a way that maybe the average man doesn't contemplate. What do you advise Hawaii how it could leverage? This kind of telecommunications technology with your advice and consultation for best effect on our economy. There it is, camera one. Absolutely. So I think the number one thing that people would be able to do is not so much focus on what they want the process to be, but focus more on the outcome. If you're trying to figure out here, what are my business goals? What is the outcome I wanna have for whatever I do? This HR policy, this technology policy, this piece of equipment I'm gonna buy. What do I want the outcome to be for my business, for my customers? And focus more on that. I think they'd be a lot better off. Avoid lock-in. I wouldn't wanna buy something where there's only one person I could go to for support for manufacture. We saw Avaya, a multi-billion dollar company who just bought out Nortel five or six years ago that they declared bankruptcy. You've been representing Nortel for decades and decades. And they were the world leader and they went out of business. And Avaya bought them and three, four days ago, Avaya declared bankruptcy. So... Well, I'll tell you what I get, okay? In terms of, I mean, where you are and where Hawaiian telecom is for that matter is you gotta be quick. You gotta be nimble. You gotta be at the front end. You can't get stuck in anything and you can't do buggy whips. You gotta be way ahead, like a century ahead of buggy whips. And it's very exciting where you are right now because you're in constant change, which is the best place to be. And with the comtel.cloud, I mean, that's getting our letting the community know that we are changing and we are involved. And that's what we tell people. And in the animal kingdom, it's not the smartest or the strongest or the fastest that survived. It's the species that has the ability to change. You know, that's what survives over time. And I think the same with business and that's why I think our future is very bright. Matt Darnall, president and CEO of Comtel Hawaii. Thank you so much for joining us. Been a pleasure. Thanks so much.