Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. This week I interviewed Tim Allen, Executive Vice President and Founding Partner of EvolveIP. Tim and I have been friends for nearly 25 years through a couple of companies, and in the interest of full disclosure, more than a decade together at a EvolveIP. Tim also joined me here in studio, which was a nice change of pace from the online interviews that make up a majority of my podcast, and frankly probably make up a majority of the meetings that you engage in on a day to day basis.

Post pandemic, EvolveIP is a pun intended company name. So we talked a lot about the theme of evolution and that being a principle tenet of their go to market and what he called evolutionaries or their ideal customer. These are people who don't want to incur technical debt, can't stand managing endpoints, don't want to be burdened with the basics of it. So what they did during and after the pandemic was instead of going product focused, they went use-case focused. They wrapped all of their products together in a virtual workspace delivering multiple legacy applications. Comms contact Center, a really interesting approach. Maybe give you some thoughts about another way to think about how you're acquiring and buying it. We commiserated a bit about moving out of the office during the pandemic. We were working together at that time, and truth be told, we were actually doing a move.

We were moving our office from one place to another when the pandemic hit. So we literally packed up our boxes, put them in our trunks, and never came back to the office. Kind of an interesting story. We talked about the challenges of service providers and technology companies during the digital transformation wave of the pandemic and forced work from home. I thought it was really interesting from a service provider perspective, but I think you'll find that interesting even as an IT buyer or technology leader. He suggested that the real effort in digital transformation is about teaching people how to use what they already have, what they've already bought. Really interesting insight and of course that led us into a conversation about the difference between broken and user error, which will be a fun little chat for IT leaders. Maybe you can commiserate with us a little bit. And then lastly you know, in the going forward category, Tim predicted the death of the operating system in the next 18 to 24 months in our shameless prediction segment. I'm sure he was being a little bit melodramatic for effect, I'm sure, but he makes some really great points that I think are valuable for us all to think about. So you don't want to miss this episode. Let's get to it. Here it is, my interview with Tim Allen of EvolveIP.

About Tim:

Tim is a 30 year veteran of the communications and “as a Service” space spending 90% of that time growing 2 companies from start up phase to $100M in revenue.   He loves helping organizations use technology to change their business, spending time with his wife of 25 years and watching his 4 kids play sports.

CONTACT TIM

Web: https://www.evolveip.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EvolveIP
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimAllen_cloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timallen3/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timallen15117/
eMail: [email protected]

Welcome to the next episode of the Bridge Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. This week we had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Nowak, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of BCM One. I won't steal his thunder, but if you're not familiar with BCM One, they are an MSP, with what Mike describes as a Nordstrom class approach, to customer fulfillment, if you will.

They're in connectivity. SDWAN SIP. They've got about a million UCaas seats out there. Very interesting company. Mike's a great speaker, dad to two girls, a self-professed builder, as he says. He goes out and builds stuff in the yard for stress relief, when his wife lets him, which I loved. We talked quite a bit about the pandemic, kind of their seminal moment for realizing that this was going to be something, you know, corporate and worldwide affecting, was when one of the big shows in our industry, Channel Partners, was canceled.

This was the company that was already prepared for remote work as they're in it, but he did talk about how depressing it was, how shocking it was to see empty offices, stopping traveling, stopping seeing partners and customers. He gives some really good feedback, even though the office vibe is sort of lost, at least to some degree, about trusting your people.

How that's the way to pull them in, give them leadership opportunities. Really interesting. We talk about that. We did get into a little bit of what BCMs return-to-work policies are going to be going forward. They have made their decisions and that may be useful to you and your business. BCM One is also a partner with, on a handful of the collaboration platforms, WebEx teams.

They have their own, which is part of the netsapiens platform. We talked a lot about Teams becoming sort of a default in the pandemic and how business sort of ran into it and are now trying to figure out what their long-term strategy looks like. It's really important to understand what the hybrid work strategy looks like.

He cautioned against people just saying: “Hey, this is what we did in the pandemic, so let's just do that going forward”. It's about figuring out requirements. How do we want to work? Who do we want to be going forward? We had a fun conversation about desk phones and whether they matter. We even talked about fax.

I can't believe we did, but we talked about fax. Mike also talked about security. You know, businesses rushed into decisions. They made mistakes. And we got a  mulligan, if you will. But now's the time to figure out what the businesses should look like on a go-forward basis, both from a security perspective and from a collaboration perspective. And then lastly, we had some really interesting banter about the role of the CIO and how their role changed within the pandemic and how they now have a strategic seat. But the key to holding that seat is to become a student of the P&L as a tech leader to understand business financials as the way to become part of that strategic conversation in the boardroom. So, you know, I'll stop blathering on. Mike's a super compelling guy. We had a great conversation. I really hope that you pull as much value from this conversation as I did. So let's get to it. My conversation with Mike Nowak from BCM One.

CONTACT MIKE

Web: https://www.bcmone.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bcmonenyc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bcm_one
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/business-communications-management/

A few weeks ago, we sat down with Artie Chang, the CEO and founder of PanTerra Networks. Artie is a true tech entrepreneur. 15 years, self-funded with some local and regional investors, out there competing, surviving every day against the big tech companies in unified communications and collaboration.

This is a guy whose tech was founded around working remote and you'd think, embedded into the culture of the business, and yet even PanTerra still struggled from some of the same cultural challenges that your business may be facing today. If you think you had some problems working during the pandemic Artie has 10 children. Ten! Six of whom, with adult jobs in the Bay Area, all decided to come home and work in the house during the pandemic.

He had some interesting feedback about their employers' ‘return to work’ plans and how his children all kind of want different things out of work, post pandemic. He called the phase we're in today the 'evaluation phase', not the 'return to work' phase. Businesses are still figuring this out.

He also talked about the pandemic kind of hitting in a time of “IT complacency”. He said “this isn't the first time we've gone through something like this, and yet it sort of hit in a period where we were comfortable with the way we were working, not challenging our norms, just sort of supporting the business from an it perspective”.

He talked about one of the challenges that we have right now is losing the ability to sort of onboard new folks into the culture, into the business, with that over the shoulder water cooler way of becoming a part of the culture, and he shared that his business has focused on competing by developing some interesting supervisory features, that he believes, and I could probably support, are not actually in some of the other big platforms that you see out there. Artie had an interesting way of thinking about how you compete, how you find those little ridges in, in which to compete in a very changing economy, in a changing way that we work.

Listen to the whole episode on your favorite podcasting platform and don’t forget to connect with Artie.

ABOUT PANTERRA NETWORKS

PanTerra is a business-class Unified Cloud Service Provider, seamlessly delivering unified communications, team messaging, webinar & team conferencing, call center, file sync & share and business analytics through Streams, its secure, unified cloud solution. By offering a fully customizable, all-in-one, HIPAA/HITECH secure, multi-service cloud solution, PanTerra can significantly reduce costs, simplify IT administration, increase security and improve employee productivity in a distributed dynamic workforce environment.

Arthur "Artie" Chang brings over 20 years of hi-tech executive experience to PanTerra Networks. Artie, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, held senior executive positions at several successful companies in Silicon Valley. Prior to PanTerra Networks, Artie was the CEO of Cradle Technologies, a multi-core multimedia DSP company and SoloPoint Communications, a provider of telecom equipment. Artie started his career at Bell Laboratories.

CONTACT ARTIE

eMail: [email protected]   
Phone: 650.283.3555     
Web: www.panterranetworks.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PanTerraNetworks/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/B24okChAZ74/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/panterranetwork
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/panterra-networks 

In this quick 1 minute intro, veteran commercial technologist Scott  Kinka outlines what you can expect from the forthcoming episodes of The Bridge.