 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott-Okitaya of JSA here at Telecom Exchange LA, Tech's LA, right here in Beverly Hills. Joining me today, we have Mr. Hal Baylor. He is the Director of Business Development for INOC. Hal, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you, Jamie. Appreciate it and happy to be here. We're honored that you're here for our fabulous kickoff in LA. I just saw this press release that came across about INOC Core. Can you tell us a little bit about your new product? Certainly. We're very excited about it. What it is is a lot of companies do have a knock, but it's very limited. It's pager, what they call pager, which is really not using pagers, but it's actually getting phone calls and texts, and that's how they handle things. People are everywhere spread out. It's hard to operationalize that and make it run smoothly. A lot of times, it's a cost thing, so they're concerned about coming up with a solution in-house, so they reach out to us and we have a very concise package. That package consists of the core elements of monitoring, and remember monitoring and management, so it's all the operational workflows, all the tools to make that happen, so we supply the tools, the monitoring system. We also supply the ticketing platform and a portal for them to log in to and update things, and so it's really this concise, lower-cost, kind of entry-level type of solution, and it gets them going, so they have a sense that there's something that's very standardized and that they don't have to go into a lot of complex operational discovery. We do that with them, but this is to keep it at a base level and get them in the door and manage their tickets or their incidents. Having known you for some time, Hal, that sounds like such a natural extension of the INOC customer first philosophy, so I love that, INOC core, for sure, to check it out. Also, you guys are always on those industry trends. We now have the industry chatting a lot about SD-WAN, SDN, NFV. How is INOC responding? Well, you know, we hear about it all the time, but it's not real until it shows up in a conversation with a prospective client. So finally, we were prepared for SD-WAN. It was gonna be the first one to come in and be really strong, and it didn't happen. And then finally, it's starting to flood in now. So we're in the middle of, and mostly complete with the device integration, which is a process that we have to implement a service like that. For most of the platforms, there's still gonna be some stragglers that we get later on, but for the common ones like VeloCloud and Viptella and Silver Peak, we're already there. We know how to receive the alarms, and we also know how to log into the cloud platforms, and we're able to support it, so things are moving along briskly, and it's amazing that it's like, you know, hey, this is starting to go, and then all of a sudden there's a flood. I signed one Friday, a big enterprise, so it's moving along pretty quickly. Now, SDN, orchestration, NFV seems to still be with the large carriers, the tier one folks around the world, but they're vetting out all the possibilities, and it's coming down to the smaller marketplaces, eventually the tier twos and tier threes. Well, something about us who are behind all these buzzwords, we always give you advanced notice. You have plenty of time to prepare. Yeah, but sometimes years. Sorry. So, organizations that focus mostly on deploying infrastructure and applications, how does Inok help monitor and manage that infrastructure like you were talking about? Well, it's, you know, there's, I guess if you look at it from a new, what's new perspective, it's both new and old, but it's making the old better is the new thing. So everything about operations is for infrastructure, and really any kind of operational workflow, any kind of operational framework, we have a good framework to start from, and then we modify it to fit that organization, whatever equipment they have, whatever operational nuances they have, sometimes they might have in a data center, a man trap that we've got to get an authorization, and somebody standing there looking at camera, and we have a whole process for that, and we'll build that process in conjunction with the client. And then if it's equipment, it's really logging into the equipment, trying to repair, dispatching, escalating if we need to, if it's an OEM issue, we escalate to them, but all of those things are under surveillance and continual service improvement, and that's only driven by having good metrics and good reporting. So if you don't have those things, you can't do the improvements because it's just somebody saying, let's fix this. Well, oh, okay, how? Well, I believe this, I believe that. Well, okay, here are the metrics, here's what we need to do. You can analyze the metrics, come up with a service improvement plan, and implement that plan just like a project. And a lot of times it's missing data. A lot of times it's a device issue. Sometimes it's that we didn't get enough information from the client about the operational workflow that they needed. So there's always a constant work process to do that continual service improvement, and of course that's a acronym from ITIL, we follow the ITIL service framework, and it comes in pretty handy. Unbelievable. And of course, INOC is US centric, but how are you supporting these global networks? The internet. Everything's reachable. VPN to a device or a system or take a phone call. The only variable really becomes language translation. So if that's a requirement, we do have a solution for that. In the most part, most of our clients are in the US, many extend out globally, and then we have a lot of partners that sell overseas and we're supporting those networks as well. So it's all the same stuff. We apply the same framework, we apply the same tenants and responsibility and governance to all of these customers, and it works across the globe standards and do it well. And that's funny too about standards in the NOC industry, which I don't know if people realize there is one, but it's kind of floating around out there trying to be an industry, but the NOC support industry has kind of limited standards. Some people do things kind of the same, but there aren't standards like there are for technologies. So we're trying to create those. We have a very concise service catalog and helping guide that. And also the nomenclature people come to us and start saying words and we go, wait a minute, we have a different word for that and it's in our service catalog. If you want us to adapt to it, we will, but if you want to adapt to what we've discovered after 19 years in business, then we can help you with that nomenclature and the terminology, the processes and procedures. And on the procedure side, change management is huge. And a lot of companies have really good change management and we apply to that change management, but a lot of companies don't have any change management and we help them along with that as well. Sorry, didn't go off topic. No, that's brilliant, that's brilliant. And sort of setting the standards, especially for the growing NOC industry, the customer service focus, the constant monitoring and reporting. These are just a few that we've already touched on. Any other reasons why INOC is so unique, those key differentiators? Well, I think it kind of goes back to some basics. Again, I'll repeat some of the stuff. It's really around the reporting and the analysis of what you do with the reporting to be able to do a good job. With that concept in mind, what we've done that actually gives us even a better view of what NOCs need or what companies need from a NOC. And it's also NOC to NOC interactions. We've actually established a NOC life cycle service. So our NOC life cycle service is actually going out and looking at other NOCs and doing an assessment. We actually go in and do a deep dive, a deep assessment of all their processes, people, tools, operational workflows, and come back with a very concise assessment and scoring a maturity matrix that shows what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong, where they need to make improvements. And then we can also help implement those improvements. So we have a complete team that's able to do that. And it's a big thing because there's not too many people that can come in and help you get to a standard model and do things right. We've gone into certain NOCs and found out that one guy takes six hours to fix a problem and the other guy takes 20 minutes. That's, and the managers don't know because they don't have the metrics. They don't have tools, or even if they have the tools to do the metrics, they don't have them set up right. So just lots of stuff there. Love it, love it. 19 plus years, still cutting edge. I'm so impressed by that, INOC brand. Tell our viewers where can they go to find out more? Inoc.com. I-N-O-C.com. Easy enough, inoc.com. Hal, thank you so much for joining us and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.