 Hey everyone, welcome to this third and final episode in our series of looking at Azure Lighthouse from different perspectives today's perspective is the one from the Microsoft reseller or as they may be known in the industry now Microsoft service partners. So if you're tired of engineering your own solutions to help your customers or if you need to guide your customers in their cloud spend. This is an episode you don't want to miss. We're going to be joined by Patrick O'Leary from soft choice and we'll get right into it right now. Hi Patrick. How are you? Good. Good. I'm happy to be here. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm really happy to have you in our series on Lighthouse from different perspectives and your perspective is from the reseller portion, right? Yeah. Yeah. We are certainly a very large reseller from an Azure perspective and also we are an Azure expert MSP and do services as well. Okay. And how long have you been using Lighthouse? It's been over about a year and a half that we've been using the technology in our operational model with how we work with our customers. Okay. And what were you using before? What did you move from and that'll start the conversation? Sure. So we had built a bit of custom technology that we integrated. We utilized the components of Azure Active Directory and did a shared services kind of model where we would implement a centralized Azure AD topology and extend that and federate it within to our customers Azure subscriptions. Okay. It was sort of like Lighthouse in very many ways. It accomplished the same things, but it was engineered by some great talent that we have here at SoftChoice. So when we had the opportunity to switch to Lighthouse, it was like, oh, well, we've been doing this for a couple of years. It's awesome that there's sort of a package solution now that we don't have to have our own custom developed solution. Hey, you don't have to manage the code on top of managing your customers code? Yeah. Yeah. That was certainly a challenge that introduced extra layers of troubleshooting. And when you would have any type of issues you had to track down, there was that added layer of our own interaction at the security layer that we had to consider. And having broad knowledge of that across the teams proved a challenge, but it was solvable and it worked well. But then the Lighthouse technology really introduced some new capabilities that we want to take advantage of. So the cost and time that we had to develop to switch really made sense to us. Okay. So I'm a little shy in my knowledge of all of the different types of partners that we have and exactly where they fit in the ecosystem. So you're a reseller. My initial thought was, okay, well, somebody wants to buy software, they buy software from you and deploy it. How does that Lighthouse in managing your customers environment, like how does that fall into the reseller model? Sure. So as a reseller, Microsoft has obviously moved away from boxed copies of Azure. It doesn't really exist, right? So a customer has to subscribe to that technology and subscribe to the use of that through what we tend to use the word to describe as consumption or consuming of that cloud environment. So as a partner that works in a reselling motion, the reality is we're not really reselling anything anymore. We're more of a services partner first than we are in the relationship we have with the customer. So that really drives the technology changes at sort of the use case level. So at a simple way to look at it is in the prior to subscription based licensing days, we would, every, you know, on a yearly cycle help the customer true up and understand their licensing spend and all that kind of stuff. And there was an EA three year cycle and those kind of things. And now that value has to be delivered on a month to month basis, because that true up cycle is technically down to minutes and seconds in some cases of the Azure services. So it's less about a routine interaction that we have with the customer over the course of years, it's more of like a day to day operational support and enablement partnership that we have to build with the customer. So if we look at how we delivered that prior service versus how we deliver the new model of helping customers use Azure in every way that they can. It's a lot more hands on it's a lot more tied into what the customer is actually trying to achieve. So Lighthouse really is the technology now that enables us to have that close relationship within the customer so that they're buying and consuming it and we're helping them do that. Okay, because I used to be in services with Microsoft and and premium service and that was my it was always a go to answer when customers came in with okay I've got licenses for this and I've got this program. And am I covered for this and I would always tell them go see your lar or your large count reseller. But now you're doing that on a like almost day to day basis. Yeah, yeah like constantly basically like the challenge with something like Azure is there's literally thousands of SKUs. So it's less about hey here's a bill that you get and here's all your SKUs it's really about how do they actively and dynamically deploy those things. So that that actually led us to becoming an Azure expert MSP partner, which enables us to really prove ourselves through an auditive process but the idea is that we want to be that go to contact point for the customer to use and learn about how to use further their Azure footprint and the technologies available to them. So it's inclusive of helping them govern helping them report on helping them secure, deploy, optimize all these kind of concepts of how they can use cloud or stuff that we want to deliver to them as part of really replacing the legacy reseller model with more of a services first approach and then, in effect, we're doing reselling but it's sort of as a result of us driving the services up front and lighthouse that is one of the core enabling technologies for us to do that. Okay, I was that that was perfect segue because I was just about to ask how does lighthouse fit in that model and how does it help you help your customers. Yeah, yeah, so the way it fits is that as you can imagine when when you're managing that relationship with hundreds to thousands of companies at one time. We have a fairly large footprint of customers that we work with every day in Azure. And the challenge is if you had individualized security connectivity for every single customer where you had to operationalize pretty much hundreds of our people to interact with all these 1000 plus customers. The issue is managing all that in a safe and secure way it's very easy for some of that to get lost in the noise or somebody writes it down on the classic sticky note on their desk those are keys to the customer castle that we do not want anybody to So what our initial use of lighthouse really was for was to reduce that risk profile and really raise our security and how we interact with the customer environment. And so we utilized it to implement a just in time and just enough access methodology so that when our people who do go hands on into the customers environment. They were requesting a time boxed access to that environment. And then also they have a an approval chain to get that access so they're only allowed to work with whichever customers authorized to work with during that time window. And finally it creates an audit trail. So for us, the use of lighthouse enabled us to timestamp the activities that that employee was doing in the customer environment, and that allows us then to have a audit trail of actions taken. So if a customer feels that we might have been involved in an issue that popped up we have the full audit trail showing what that engineer did at that time. And we can, you know, either defend or confirm the customers, you know, insinuation that we were involved in it. So initially it was it was highly useful and reducing our liability situation there, as well as, you know, really enhancing our confidence and having hundreds of people interact with thousands of customers and and not have that sort of worry in the back of your head that something's going to something's going to go wrong from a security prospect. Yeah, it's really as much as a comfort blanket for the customer as it is for you because you start with a very set and an auditable and and configurable set of permissions. So the customer doesn't have to worry that maybe you're doing something you shouldn't be doing when you're accessing those systems. Exactly. And because because it's all logged in reportable, we can generate reports showing that activity to the customer if they if they find that useful. It also helps them with their industry audits and other kind of compliance the audits as well. So a lot of times because many of our customers are in an industry where they've got to prove that partners that work with them are just as secured as they are, we have this technology to show their auditors and their, you know, and help them achieve that without worry from our perspective. So as a reseller or a managed or a service provider service partner, sorry. Does the governance of the your customers environment come into play like do you help them manage that part of of the Azure footprint. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we evolved over the past, let's say decade from that reseller relationship to the MSP and and you know more advanced services partner with these customers naturally. And, and you know the enabling technologies and reasons to do that are numerous but what I think really made the most sense for us is that when we start to look at how customers spend money in Azure, cost controls and governance mixed with operations, operational business rules that they want to enforce on that environment. Those are the two areas where our expertise in the resell motion in our, you know, our legacy of doing great work with Microsoft technology in that reseller process, translate very well into a managed services model that it that looks like on the surface a reselling motion, but under it is really the more modern way to help a customer buy and consume Azure. And that is through the governance that is really helping them implement policies and controls. And the way we do that is has evolved a lot we used to do it very manually on a per customer basis. And with the lighthouse technology, we can actually piggyback across that connection to implement automation and deployment technologies across the lighthouse connection point that we have. And that enables us to really be confident in a standard set of governance policies and procedures across all customers. And then we can customize per customer after that. So we do a lot of like really granular alignment of each customers, like purchase mechanisms and business approval rules and processes. Sort of, you know, a more common word these days is Phenops, but I would say it's more just general governance of how they use and spend money. Governance and financial operation is a very important portion of the business, especially when you when you're working in an environment that is pay for play like a consume model where it's not like you're deploying that server in your data center and you have so many cores and so much RAM and it's there whether or not you use it, but you've already paid for it so it doesn't matter in in Azure. If you're using it you're paying more for it. Yeah, so when we look at how these companies are spending money as they transition into more and more of their workloads going to a cloud consumption based operating model, the way that they think about money is very different. I used to be an internal IT. I also have worked in a data center hosted company in my past roles before joining soft choice. And that was very much a CapEx business model, multiple year hardware refresh cycles renewable pieces and seeing things like that. When we help customers migrate from that into a cloud consumption model, the ways in which they think about spending money versus the value they get for that money shifts from a depreciation schedule of a three or four year cycle or whatever they have on their hardware down to what's the benefit. What's the use what's the performance I get maybe down to the second or minute of that service. And they're thinking about things like throughput scalability burst ability business resiliency in a much different context than if you're just going to have multiple data centers with integrated data and servers. So that's one of the biggest areas that we see a lot of customers sort of change their viewpoint, and we have to help them with that because the old ways of thinking about spending money on technology really shift as well. And many customers can get there and get there fast and others need help. And so that's where we help in that in that purchasing relationship so we actually do two things to help them one is we fully report and give them full visibility and dashboards into how they spend money on Azure. Yep, down the skew we give them tools to do budget modeling and charge back build back to different lines of business these are things that you know traditional internal it on premise technology working with you know the accounting department solved decades ago, which now changes in the new cloud world. Does that include sorry sorry to interrupt but does that include right sizing. Yep. Yeah, okay. So your customer is using a lot more than they actually need that will come into your report and actually help them use the resources better. Yeah, yeah, we help them. We help them with that and we also help them consider alternative purchase models like reserved instances and optimizing their spend on compute in those kind of ways. And then we always, we always look at what's going to give them the confidence to start trying things in cloud that's where we marry up a 24 7365 support model so if they're doing Azure business with us they get those two things just for doing business with us, and they really ramped up their confidence level and then we, we add the value added services on top and and lighthouse underpins all those things in the way that we access those environments and then extend those technologies support services and automation engines into each of their Azure subscriptions. So you've mentioned so far that you have benefits in terms of policies and governance in terms of automation and and and support in terms of OPEX capex and financial operations for your customers. Any drawbacks. Anything that you wish would be a little different. Certainly so I think one of the, the interesting parts of the interaction with the customer is that they're looking for us to proactively warn them when there is an issue or an outage in their environment. And that gets difficult when it goes beyond the service layer so more complex the cloud environment gets the more application aware or output of that application aware your monitoring systems need to be. So from a, you know, technology standpoint we have to augment the capabilities with their party solutions which are fairly expensive. Depending on what the customers looking to do also require pretty intimate knowledge of their application or, or, you know, application stack. So that creates a pretty large uplift in the skills required to deliver those kind of services for those, those customers that are doing native cloud development, or, you know, highly dynamic workloads in cloud. That's one drawback you've got to as a partner we had to bring those skills to the table to meet that challenge. It wasn't plug and play and I don't, I don't know if there would be ever a future where that can be plug and play. But that's, that's a bit of an uplift I would say and capabilities and you got to convince the customer that you can actually dig into their application much deeper than they might be willing to let you to provide those insights. Right sizing of VM is fairly easy to predict them and analyze right sizing a massive application spread around multiple data centers globally using serverless compute everywhere that's a totally different scenario we're looking at user stories and you're getting into their dev ops, you know, processes as their CI CD pipelines and that's a whole nother level of interaction. So from that standpoint, it's a, it's a big jump to go from that resell support motion that we are, are heavily engaged into the much more intimate into the customer environment. The technology allows us to do both but convincing the customer they need that help is where it gets challenging. Yeah, but at least the customer can or your next customer can benefit from that knowledge that you've already acquired and get to that point much faster than they would if they were trying to do this on their own. Yeah, so absolutely. Our, I guess you could say it's sort of like an economy of scale scale. We have the ability to learn best practices update knowledge basis and then as we, as we, you know, solve these challenges for one customer in a specific vertical or industry that might apply to other individuals or other customers in that same vertical or industry, and we bring those best practices to bear we we update our baselines and our images and things like that and then it just constantly improves across multiple customers. One of the what I think the challenges is as they get used to our interaction level in the cost reporting and support and right sizing and those kinds of things especially at the infrastructure layer. I would like this to already know if there's a problem or an issue with the Azure layer, or even their application layers the Azure layer is a tough one because you know we're constantly juggling outage alerts and stuff across many customers so it's, sometimes it's hard to say is this an Azure platform issue like a service outage which is super rare of course but, or is it a specific to that customers application and code issue things like that so when you start seeing, you know those proverbial warning lights going off across hundreds of customers it's like okay how do we rapidly drill into this and determine that we need to escalate maybe back to Microsoft and suggest the problem at the platform layer rather than an individual customer. It's hard to it's hard to not when you're seeing all these warning lights as you mentioned across a bunch of different customers to not jump to the conclusion that there's an underlying infrastructure it might just be a coincidence. Yeah, but you can't make that assumption you still have to look it up and ensure that it's not a foundation system. Yeah, or even some outside Azure dependency service that we found you know maybe customers contracted with somebody like an Adobe, or something like that for other parts of their application stack and it's impacting services within the Azure cloud because they're all interdependent across you know a hybrid deployment with CDNs or third party DNS systems or whatever you know there's there's thousands of examples but that's always the challenge when we have this level of access the customers get used to it and they're looking for those immediate answers and sometimes we can't provide it even with the greatest technology. Well, Patrick that was that was actually enlightening there there's there's a portion of that sort of like reseller service partner that I've not been really close with in the last in the last few years and and I really enjoyed our conversation that it really puts in perspective the benefits for the reseller or the partner but also for the customers who are using those systems for support for fin ops for operations and and troubleshooting. So I want to thank you very much for spending the time with us to talk about your experience as a reseller or a service partner as you mentioned. I'm going to have to change that that that word in my head and now start stop using reseller and stop using service partner. So Patrick, thank you very much for spending the time with us. This was very educational for me and for our audience and I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me and it's been great to just talk about our last couple years of evolution as a reseller to a services partner and we're still reseller but most of the value ring is in that services sphere of influence with our customers so it's been awesome. I really appreciate it. Appreciate you asking me to be on the on the on the call here. All right. Thank you very much.