 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for data center and telecom professionals We're here live from ITW 2022 here on the exhibit hall floor. I'm here with how Baylor Solutions executive at I knock welcome Hal. Thank you very much. Appreciate that Absolutely. We're glad to have you here So let's just table set a little bit to start off with here So if you could just tell us a little bit about I knock sure I knock is an outsourced knock service provider and also a knock operations consulting business Excellent. All right. So I know You all at I knock have been speaking with the wholesale community here at ITW this week about not consulting So if you could dig into that a little bit for us sure sure It's really become the hot topic for us and a lot of our clients I mean most of our clients especially in the telecom space and data center space Have some sort of support component. It's usually in the form of a network operation center and network operation centers have grown over the years Organically and there are a lot of new things going on and knock operation center Work and how they're automated How they're set up so really it gets around To needing to build a framework for this and how do you build a framework? Well? That's why we've come up with this knock consulting practice. We've been doing this for over six years now It's been very successful and very eye-opening to our clients So what we do is we go in and do an assessment and we assess the company's Platform which is really critical Platform means that there's a lot of components to that There is the monitoring system which everybody knows about and does and a ticketing system Which everybody knows about and does and then it gets into Configuration management database the CMDB and how accurate that is and then digging into integrations But also there's this new factor that's finally come of age. It's mature now and it's called AI ops it's automation of events or the monitoring output and correlating all those events and all of the CMDB data to determine what's actually going on So then you actually once you do that well, which is hard to do by the way, and that's why we do consulting around it What you see is a ticket pops up and that's the the gold standard that everybody guy tries to get to So the single ticket pops up the ticket knows what's going on and therefore the engineer knows what's going on Also within the ticketing system again talking about platform There's a lot of design around that and how you manage third parties like other carriers How you manage your staff other third-party staff? truck rolls You know just a litany of different components that you've got to manage through the ticketing system Then on the other side of that you have to have good reporting Good reporting allows you to be able to look at KPIs or key performance indicators and metrics that allow you to manage your business Most companies don't have that some have done it really well, but many haven't we've heard the number from a number of sources that most companies CMDB, which is critically important about 25% Percent of companies have actually put together a good quality high-quality CMDB, which allows their not to work Properly so without that you're typically Searching for records or you make a mistake and then you find out that you've made that mistake and you have to correct it So all of these things how you put all these things together from the platform perspective is important So it's normally people process platform, but that's switched around now It's platform Process and people then we get into process how these workflows happen And you also want to automate that with the ticketing system This goes on and on but there are things like runbooks that you need to develop that you can embed those now into the ticketing systems With knowledge articles so that those pop up with the alarm and the ticket And then it goes into staffing how you staff so do you want to have a bit of Extremely knowledgeable engineers. Well, maybe that's not the most cost-effective thing because Simple tasks can be done by lower level engineers So that's why you want to get into understanding what your metrics tell you at what tier levels How to support that and how to run this team? So those are touch points of some of the things that we do with not consulting And that's the that's the tip of the iceberg Excellent. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity with not consulting and in the market right now So I heard that you're you're also talking about service catalogs with some companies that you're working with So if you could just touch on that a little bit as well, sure sure so service catalogs are that part of the service that is defined by what a IT organization or Slash knock organization is supposed to perform for its customer and a knock organization Performs for its internal customers and its external customers. So what are those definitions of what they're supposed to do and? ITIL guides us to develop what's called a service catalog that service catalog Define specifically defines feature service features and once you define those service features and bet those out into a great detail And that organization has exact in clear Direction of what to do so that service catalog is a Guide point and that can also be embedded into your ticketing platform So it's it's a big piece of what people are trying to do And they will tend to start to work on it and then get muddled down and they have too much work to do So they don't continue it and we can come in and help with service catalogs as well All right, awesome How great information and if you could just tell us where our viewers could go to learn more about I knock and your services It's really pretty hard to find but if you go to I knock calm. I think you'll get there All right easy enough you heard it here first I knock calm So so thank you how for joining us today. We're really Absolutely, we're happy to have you and thank you viewers for hanging out with us for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast Happy networking