 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Everybody to Data Movers, I'm your host, Jamie Scott of the TIA, CEO and founder of JSA. Along with me, my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Castero. Hey Evan. Hey, how are you? Good to see you. How's life post vaccination? You know, I'm starting to feel more brave. I'm starting to venture out slowly, but surely. So it's feeling good, but look at you. All beach attire with the palm trees blowing in the wind in the background. Where are you logging in from? Yeah, I'm just sitting in my basement. No, but in all seriousness, I've taken my first vacation, sort of getaway post vaccination and it feels great. You know, it's liberating. Yeah, so which location did you choose? Anywhere in the world and you chose? Florida, of course, because why not? But yeah, I read the TSA reports of air travel are up the highest since pre-pandemic. Hotels are coming back. You know, the world is emerging at least in the U.S. So it's very exciting. And maybe we'll even go to events again sometime in the next few weeks and months. Imagine that. It'd be exciting. I know I heard Europe is starting to let vaccinated Americans back in. So the world is slowly becoming more back to normal-ish, slowly, but surely, excited to get there. And thank y'all for listening to our Data Movers podcast as we call back to normalcy. And talking podcast, Data Movers. I'm so excited about our guests today. Of course, Data Movers, we sit down with the most influential men and women of today's leading telcos and data centers. We support the network infrastructure requirements of our modern world. We talk about that. We get the best tips and trending ideas. And so today we're really excited to have none other than Bruce Lairman, co-founder and CEO of Involta. Okay, thank you, Reverend Mead. Yeah, thanks, Bruce. And I've been following you and Involta for years. So great to finally connect. And it looks like you're in Iowa. You grew up in Iowa, actually on a farm. I did. So tell me, how has farming changed from when you grew up on a farm to today? How much technology is being embraced on the farm? Yeah, it's amazing the difference between when I grew up on a farm many, many years ago to the technology being used today. I still have family that are in the farming community and farm a lot. And the tractors today drive themselves across the field. So back when I was there, you didn't have any of these curvy lines of me being distracted on a tractor or anything like that. It's all GPS controlled and all of the chemicals they're applying them with drones and things. It's just unbelievable to see what's happening in kind of advanced agriculture. It's incredible to think of how that drone or that John Deere is now your latest edge device. And speaking of edge devices, more and more organizations, not just farmers are moving data towards the edge. So tell us about your team and how you helped your customer empower that edge to innovation. Yeah, it's really interesting. We started down the journey of exploring kind of what edge would be for our customer base and for us the primary verticals that we focus on are healthcare, manufacturing and financial services. And the edge has yet to emerge fully in a lot of these verticals, but everybody's talking about it and everybody is thinking about what is the architecture required for deploying edge. And your point is very important around agriculture and more rural areas. If you have manufacturing plants in rural areas, it's difficult to get network. And so if you think about having a smart manufacturing environment, getting to that location, having an edge data center close to your manufacturing, it's gonna be very important. And so that's one healthcare is obviously working towards the edge. We're seeing the deployment of the 5G networks and people gearing up for what that means in an edge strategy. And so kind of industry by industry and case by case, we're seeing a lot of people talking about edge now and just from an emergent standpoint, all the analysts are predicting big growth numbers and edge, I think the latest IDC numbers was a quarter of a trillion dollars in the next few years and edge. I mean, we've talked to the big iron manufacturers, like HP and people like that, they're re-architecting their entire approach to being focused on decentralizing IT again. And so we really believe that the edge strategy is really the next big wave of innovation in IT. And we're positioned really well. We're in a lot of the markets that you would consider to be edge today. And it's why we believe that we're well positioned with edge and working with our clients to help them kind of build out their edge strategy. I no doubt about it. With the pandemic, everything has been accelerated. Enterprises are really moving quickly in their transformation journey. Talk to us about Involta's innovation framework and how this has really helped enable transformation at any stage for enterprises. Yeah, so we have built onto a consulting framework that we've had for many years but really enhanced it over the last few years because there's so many organizations that are really trying to understand how to really transform their business and IT leaders are wanting to be good partners with the business and how to drive sales and how to drive a better customer experience. And a lot of times that technology, organizations need help in terms of building out that framework for how they're going to really be a partner in the business with that innovation. And so we have a series of consulting practices that help those organizations kind of, we meet them where they are today and ultimately our tagline is get there. And it's really about helping an organization from where they are today to getting to where they need to be and position themselves for the future as that innovation is moving quickly. And our customers know it and they know that they need to be innovating more now than they've ever innovated before. Yeah, that's a great point. I love the sense of urgency. IT complexity as an all-time high for most organizations. You think about healthcare with the pandemic and the shift to telemedicine and telehealth or even manufacturing and the disruption in supply chain. I mean, just amazing challenges and opportunities to transform from within. So how does it both to really help leadership tackle this really challenging environment? Yeah, that's a great question. So just from the basis of our company, our brand promise is really about superior infrastructure and services, operational excellence and people who deliver. And that's really the core of how we deliver to the marketplace. And when we think about the challenges that they've faced and especially over the last year, we've seen organizations and I'll give you an example of a regional grocery store company and super regional organization, they've gone from less than 1% of their deliveries being digital and people ordering online to almost 10% or more some months. That means that they accelerated their plan for adoption by seven years. They thought it would be seven years to get past that 10% mark. They did it in basically three or four months. And the same thing is happening in a lot of other industries where it's really transformed how people think about what they can do. And even what we're doing here today with video meetings and that, there was so much reluctance to get on a video meeting pre-pandemic and turn your camera on like, oh my goodness, what's gonna happen? Somebody's gonna steal my bedroom or whatever. But now, I mean, it's just commonplace and you see cats and dogs, you see little kids running around the background. I was like, it's just become a whole new thing. But those are just part of what is happening in the IT workplace now. It is really, we talked about it earlier but really moving at a breakneck speed at this point, meeting kind of the new expectations and work from home is gonna continue on. We're having employees all over the place. We have the 5G deployment. Yeah, there's gonna be a number of new disruptors that we've never even heard of before that are gonna create opportunities out of this edge, out of this hybrid IT world. And organizations have to keep up with all the things that are going on. And so, we again feel like we're a good partner to be able to bring to light some of the best and breed people that we see making a difference in that world and helping them get through adoption. And with all this need for bandwidth and broadband, hybrid cloud is really at the forefront of an organization's IT tool set. How can enterprises integrate hybrid solutions in a way that doesn't compromise their existing day-to-day operations? Yeah, it's for hybrid IT strategy. I mean, again, historically, everybody thought of deploying things in a way that would be good for three years or five years. And we're gonna buy all this new hardware and then we're gonna go deploy this stuff and then we'll figure out what that next step is when this equipment runs out of juice. And in today's world, it's really about that hybrid IT whereby architecture and deployment is, I can move it at a moment's notice wherever it makes the most sense for me. If I build my systems around being easily moved from a private cloud to a public cloud from Amazon to Microsoft to in Volta to an edge player, if you start architecting your systems like that, you can start to have much less disruption and complexity as you go forward. And so that's really one of the things that we really work hard with our clients to make sure that they have the most flexible environment as they think about building out their, kind of this next hybrid IT architecture. And it's become such a big word that a few years ago, as we went into enterprise organizations, they would say, well, everything is gonna be in the public cloud and that we had this cloud first sort of play. And now, as we go into organizations, enterprises, it's really, they're talking about hybrid IT. It's a lot of different things that are gonna come together. And again, it's really hard to be as an enterprise an expert in all of these areas. So I think, again, it really helps them understand the value of having true partners in their strategy. Yeah, and speaking of expertise, the biggest challenge in technology today, in my opinion, is people. I mean, there just aren't enough people who understand cloud, who understand security to help scale and manage this massive shift. You know, the hyperscalers and startups really snap up many of the good technologists who are available. So I was reading here that Envolta recently launched cloud ops workshop series to enable success. How does that gonna work? Our cloud ops workshop, again, is structured around starting with, what are you trying to accomplish? And then how do we best help you architect that going forward? And to your point, Evan, it is very difficult for a lot of enterprise organizations to have the ability to recruit the talent that can help them do that. So you mentioned startups and tech companies that are absorbing a lot of those people that can do that for them. We're fortunate that we're also an organization that is attractive to the best of breed talent so that they wanna come work in an organization like ours because two thirds of our people, our technical people doing this work, doing cutting edge work for lots of different clients. So they're not shoved down in the basement with some organization somewhere doing this work. They're out on the forefront, working with some of the leading companies and doing some of the leading edge work for many, many different companies. So for us, I think we're able to leverage those people to help the enterprise organizations build out that strategy and build out their security platform, which is another area that's really difficult to hire right now. And talking about people, our families, last year, 2020, total crazy mess with the pandemic. But also last year, we had a terrible, terrible fast moving powerful series of storms sweeping across Iowa and parts of the Midwest where Involta is headquartered. So how did Involta come together to support businesses through this disaster recovery efforts and how did you guys support each other? Yeah, it's, I learned a new term last year and it's called the Rachel Storm. And it was a storm that was about 75 miles high if you're looking at the map of the United States in about 600 miles long. And it hit kind of the peak speed of the winds around the Cedar Rapids area. And that was more like a hurricane. It was 140 to 150 mile an hour sustained winds for 45 minutes. The city lost about two thirds of its tree canopy during that storm. And you can imagine the amount of poles that went down and all that in the Midwest. People plan for a tornado to take out a section of land, a couple of miles wide maybe and three or four miles long. No one plans on a storm like this. Power providers would lose 35 out of 36 sub stations. Cell phone towers were down all that. I mean, it was an amazing storm. Our facility continued to operate as planned. We were on generator power. We didn't have any power from our utility, but we did operate for nearly a week on generator power and our customers were taken care of. We helped a lot of organizations during that time. If they didn't have a good DR plan, they were implementing DR plans on the fly. So you can talk about speed to serve us. I mean, people were literally moving equipment in the middle of the night, getting it into our power network and all that. And our people kind of worked around the clock with clients to do that. Meantime, a lot of our employees, as they're helping our clients, had trees down on their house. Many houses were hit with trees. And so we had a lot of our company came from our different offices, Ohio and Minnesota and other places. They brought generators, they brought chainsaws, they bought water, they brought all kinds of capability. And it was just really great to see the level of effort that as everybody is working together to keep clients taken care of and new clients that need help, we're helping the employees. And just to finish up with that story, we just recently had a day where we gave away up to five new trees for all of the employees and taught them how to plant them and all that. So that was kind of the, hopefully the end to the derecho story is that we're replanting Cedar Rapids again. So. Well, that's a lovely story. And yeah, it seems like these hundred year events, weather events are happening every year now. So it's really scary time. My favorite new word of 2021 is resilience. So whether it's when it comes to data centers or just your personal life and outlook, resilience is the new key. So looking at your career, it's pretty interesting and it's great to see an entrepreneurship story that's not like Silicon Valley or New York all the time. But tell me about how you started in Volta and grew the company to one of the forefront digital transformation firms in the country. Sure. So I really started to like the data center market when I was first exposed to it. I had a startup and we were doing streaming media technology back in the late nineties, back when probably shouldn't have been doing it, but because the technology wasn't quite there. But we found the only place to put servers that we could get reliable internet to do live events was in Palo Alto, the first internet data center in Palo Alto internet exchange. And back then you kind of had to know somebody that knew somebody to get a few servers racked up and have reliable internet. And so I tracked that industry for a long time and really found that I really did love the data center market. It's kind of like met a lot of the, you know, kind of industry kind of things that I would like to do. And I kept thinking about, I should start up a company like that someday. And lo and behold, a friend of mine called one day and said, hey, I have this data center that's been abandoned. I don't know what to do with it. Can you come over and take a look at it and see what I can do? And so we started talking and the next thing you know, we started the company and merged with another company and we were off to the races and starting to build new data centers and new markets. And it's been a really fun ride ever since. That's great. That's a picture of that data center. It's not quite the Google garage yet, but almost as good. Yeah. I love it. And you know, something that has been a theme throughout our whole conversation here is, it's really how you're fostering the culture of innovation and add involved with the people. Again, planting those trees to help recover. Can you tell us a little bit more and maybe a few words of advice you'd have to offer in how to culture innovation? Yeah, I think it is fostered inside the DNA of our company. And I think we really work hard to make sure that we are driving innovation for ourselves and our clients. One of the things that I experienced was this thing called a startup weekend. I don't know if you guys have experienced those before, but basically generally it's a bunch of younger people, they get together on a weekend and they all pitch an idea and the best ideas get graded and then people say like, I want to work on this team and they spend all weekend. Usually it's a software project, but there can be other things as well. And then they work all weekend to crank something out and build an MVP. And I'm like, well, how do we do that in an organization? So we and Anne Elgar, CISO was really the one that drove that project, but we worked on how do we recreate that in this environment? So we did pull everybody together, we did some virtual pitches and then brought everybody together that were gonna work on kind of three main themes. And so we did that kind of right before the pandemic hit and we're gonna kick it off again this year and do that in person again as people are getting vaccinated and stuff. So those projects, and again, during this pandemic, people continue to work on how do we automate, how do we innovate within the organization? And honestly, during the pandemic, it was a great opportunity for us to make great progress on working in the business and not with customers all the time. So really some great innovation came out of that and I was really proud of the group that did it. And I think the other thing that we do from an innovation perspective is I mentioned we have three verticals, we've created advisory boards in each three of those verticals. And so we spend a lot of time with our, their clients and non-clients, but kind of industry leaders in those verticals and they help drive innovation for us. And we talk about what we've done based on the last few meetings, the things that we've tried, the things we've decided not to do and the things that we've implemented. And we also talk about where we think we wanna go going forward and get really good feedback and they've told us before, that's a really bad idea and we're like, okay, we get it. So we'll stop talking about that and we'll go back to what we were thinking about before. But anyway, those are two areas that I think have really helped us internally drive a lot of innovation beyond just sheer kind of innovation spirit that we have inside the organization. Also, I hope there are lots of beer and hot dogs at those start-up weekends. But there's definitely lots of food and beverage. I thought you were gonna say there's a lot of good board meetings. That too. So now's our rapid fire section where we shoot a few fun facts your way and try to embarrass you. But so here we go. Favorite sports team and why? Well, I have spent a lot of time down in the Tampa St. Pete area recently and they are now referred to as Champa Bay. I don't know if you know that but because the Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl and the Rays were in the World Series and the Hockey team won the Stanley Cup last year. So I've become a sports fan of the Tampa Bay teams but probably I'd have to say that Tampa Bay Buccaneers at this point are my favorite sports team. All right, well as a Boston Pats fan I'll be rooting against you. Neither. Right, well you can come down anytime and it's easy to get tickets down here compared to Fenway. And your number one piece of CEO advice. Yeah, so I think, and we talked a little bit about it. I think the culture of a company and the people are the most important part of having a successful company. I think it really spills out into how you deal with customers and making sure customers are first. So I think making sure that the people are right and the culture's right is the most important thing in growing and starting a company. And I think even in our advisory boards we were talking about earlier sometimes we get talking about the technology and what we're doing here and what we're doing with this and the strategy here. And we get brought back with our advisory board sometimes say like really it's people are one of your key strengths and you need to continue to focus on that as well. And I think as a company we do but sometimes we forget to talk about it. Yeah, great point. Now everyone knows CEOs work too much. What do you do to unwind, escape, relax or otherwise? Yeah, I have a lot of hobbies but I think probably the thing that helps me escape the best would be I try to get out cycling as much as I can and it's been probably the thing that's kept me in shape throughout this pandemic as best as I could. So there's been a lot of challenges to stay in in shape during the pandemic but I think cycling for me is an hour or more that I get a chance to just get out. So... It's a great sport for the pandemic. You still do it safely so that's a good one. And where is your favorite place to travel? We hear from Evan he's down in Florida for the first time now, where's yours? You know, I love traveling. I travel a lot from, I love to explore new places. So I think my favorite place is probably the next place I'm going but I don't know where that is for sure. I have a couple of places on the list but I definitely love going to Europe and my son is based in Luxembourg now. So we're gonna try to meet him somewhere that'll allow some vaccinated Americans to come in and we're thinking maybe Croatia's next on the list. Wow, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah, Croatia's beautiful, beautiful ocean. Luxembourg's amazing too. You can pour the entire country in about a day. I know that right, yeah. It's fantastic. And what music do you guys play in your startup weekend blaring in the background? Well, it doesn't always my music that gets to be played on startup weekend but I do, you know, I grew up with 80s music and I've worked really hard to like not get trapped in time. So I think my XM station that I'm on the most is probably Alt Nation. Oh, 80s on 80s, like all the way, all the time. People know me as far as they're getting. Yeah, I do bounce back from 80s and 90s sometimes. So you know, Jamie likes to sing along. That's why she's on the 80s. Like glaringly, so and I'm not a singer. My husband's family. Spotify playlist that's songs to sing along in a car. So you might want to check that out. Oh, Jamie, we need a data movers playlist with every guest's favorite song. So yeah, you know, like intro with it, you know. Yeah, exactly. Well, something for next time. And and last but not least, favorite and bolted event. I feel like my team might have written that question. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that we do as we open up new data centers is we usually have a big grand opening event and it's really an opportunity. I mean, I'll put myself in a category of, you know, sometimes you get to in your head about the things that you need to accomplish, you know, the next day, the next week, the next year and you don't stop sometimes and celebrate. And so for us, you know, when we open a new data center, it's really an opportunity for us to bring a lot of our employees together and stop and with our customers and prospective customers and really celebrate. And it's been really one of the most fun things that we do is get that group together. And sometimes it does give a lot of control. We've been known to take over the stage and howl at the moon and stuff like that. So help me in. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Bruce. It was really great to see how you're, you're merging people and technology and innovation and culture into, you know, this unique entity called Involtus. So congrats on all your success. Yeah. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time today. We appreciate you and guys out there listening if you enjoyed today's data movers podcast, go ahead and check out more jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data movers episodes released every other week on Wednesday mornings as well as other GSA podcasters. Great. And also follow us on Twitter at Jay Scott and Evan Kirstel. And we're going to be doing Twitter Spaces soon, which is an audio version of Twitter and even Clubhouse. So more ways to find us and engage. Absolutely. And as always, everybody stay safe and happy networking.