 Hi there and welcome to another edition of Tuesdays with Corey. I am in my special, my special place, my special MSP series. And I'm talking with a set of MSPs, very exciting to hear some of the awesome work that they are doing to help customers move and modernize to the cloud. So please tell us a little bit about who you are and tell us a little bit about who you work for and what you do. Sure. I'm Greg Davidson. I'm from Auckland in New Zealand. Okay. And I work for Datacom. We're an IT company based in New Zealand in Australia, about 5,000 people. We're actually doing quite a wide spectrum of different things, including software development application management, managed services, network management, I can keep going. Yeah, yeah, long list. Got it. Okay, great. And now for Datacom, do you guys specifically focus on Australia and New Zealand or is it a broader reach? Well, we started in New Zealand, we now got a really good presence in Australia. Sure, a great place to sit. And then we got a small presence up in Asia. Up in Asia as well. Okay, great. Got it. Okay, cool. Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia. Okay, got it. So people in the US wouldn't buy from you today? Yeah, actually we work with some organizations up here. Fantastic. We do quite a bit of work for Dell helping them in the Office 365 space. Oh, okay, great. Okay, so this is interesting. So you support customers both when they're modernizing both on the Office 365 site and on the Azure site. Yes. Cool. So they can basically come to you for all of their needs, which is great. So on the Azure side, when you're helping customers move into the cloud, you're helping them sort of consider what to do, right? What are some of the things that you guys look at particularly to help customers make this transition, right? It's a tough transition for a lot of customers. All customers are different, but I think there are sort of three key parts to it. There's an assessment, which is looking at what they've got. Got it. What's going to move easily? Right. The biggest benefit, and then the things that they've perhaps got that are going to be harder to manage or move to the cloud. The second bit would be how to migrate, but the important bit and the bit that I think has probably got not enough attention is what it's like in run state. To operate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's to operate. And so what you don't want to do, you want to keep efficient operation, which is something that, of course- Or even improve their operations if you can. Yeah, yeah. So the cloud enables you to, probably the most significant of this is more dramatically automate operations. Fantastic. So when you migrate, what you want to be doing is transforming it to a really efficient run state. Excellent, excellent. So when you say automate, this is the full range of scripting and even changing applications, or is it mostly keeping applications unchanged? It can be anything, I mean obviously a genuine born in the cloud application is a completely different- Different beast. Architecture. Totally, yeah. And so if they've got things that, you know, if you're doing it as part of them targeting, delivering new services, or as part of a digital transformation, you might build something completely new. Got it. So if you look into the spectrum, if you consider the traditional role of a managed services provider, it's going to be about cost-efficient operation to high service levels and get it removing risk. Yes. And so you have the opportunity to automate many of the traditional tasks I see. Rather than have people sort of deliver them through process. Got it. So something very important then that I think you guys, that you look at and focus on one, you obviously take the whole spectrum, right? Whether it be born in the cloud applications and sort of building fresh. But also then this lift and shift. And your key point here is that, hey, your classic service provider in a lift and shift type of environment, it would be, we ran it here, now we're just going to run it here. And you're saying, whoa, hold on, that's actually maybe not the right approach. We probably won't get an efficient run. You're going to go change your operations, you're going to go and we're going to help you get there, even though we're the service provider that's helping you. So one of the biggest things to think about is the change in discipline when you go from managing capacity to managing consumption. Yeah, I got it. You know, the number one thing that happens to customers when they go from capacity to consumption. I like that. It's consumption explosion. I like that. I like that. Because if you take all the traditional barriers to provision new capacity away, or what do people do? That's right. The physical barriers are gone. They just consume heaps of it. The physical barriers are gone. So now they do whatever they want, which is then a different set of problems. So the first thing you're doing is you're heavily helping them manage consumption. Yes. Now, it is possible through automation to do a whole lot of things that ensure that applications run more efficiently. What you want to do is have transparency, help people understand where they're creating cost and give them the ability to make choices about switching things off. Switching things off and controlling this. Automating. Yeah. Understanding what's being heavily used, what's not. That's awesome. Okay. Very cool. So that's awesome. It sounds like that's a big focal point for you guys. It sounds like something you do very well here. So if you had one sentence here to say, hey, this is, or a couple of words, whatever, that this is what is great about Datacom. What would you say? Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't prepare you for this. I should have. No, no, no. I know. I should have prepared. It's terrible. Yeah. You definitely sprang me up. I know. I'm sorry. You definitely sprang me up on that one. A single word what makes this difficult. Or you can make it a sentence. Make it a sentence. How about a sentence? I don't need a word because I couldn't describe a word for Azure that makes it awesome. Sure. Awesome. Maybe. Perhaps if I talk about what I hope our people will bring to customers. Perfect. That's great. Okay. I hope they bring expertise. Mm-hmm. I hope they bring some insight. Yes. And I hope they bring some imagination about what's possible. Okay. That's great for feeling like I sprung it. I think you landed a really good answer. Okay. Great. So with that, thank you so much. It was really great talking with you. And thank you guys so much for joining in. We will take questions if you've got them on Twitter with hashtag Azure TWC so we will look for questions and we'll make sure that if people have questions for you or want to get in touch with you, we can make that connection on Twitter. So thank you so much for your time and thank you guys and have a wonderful Tuesday. No problem. Thank you so much. Of course. You'll see me start off that way so we'll be fine. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. There is no four. There is no walls here, Rick. Freedom. All right, are you ready? Yes. Okay. All right. It was a clap. All right. Oh, I didn't do it on the last one. All right, fine. I always do. Okay. He's so proud. All right. You ready? You good? Yeah. I hope so. All right.