AI, Cloud, and Tacos: Navigating Tech’s New Frontier with Sean Wisdom

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You want tech and tacos? Tacos in tech you know we got tacos in tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper Countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles Founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coding yoga fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to coast angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Hoya shows entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana St. Be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon. South Dakota goes with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on.

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Welcome to the Tacos in Tech podcast where we interview tech leaders in the San Diego tech ecosystem. We also read the latest tech news on this week in San Diego Tech news. Follow us and subscribe online to your favorite podcast network. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm thrilled to have Sean Wisdom, Chief marketing officer of RapidScale on the pod this week. Hey Sean, good to have you here.

Hey, thanks so much. Glad to be here.

It's great to start this conversation. It's a busy time of year as people are starting to think about the end of the year. People, I feel like everyone's forcing stuff, being like, oh, we gotta get everything done before Thanksgiving and man, in the tech world nothing slows down. Anyway, so man, it's gotta be a busy time for you. So thanks for making some time to join the podcast with us.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Do you want to give us a quick overview of what rapid scale is?

Sure, yeah. So RapidScale is one of the leading multi cloud service providers in the industry. We've got a full portfolio of private hosted public cloud solutions all the way from app development modernization through migration optimization and then a full portfolio of cybersecurity offerings. Everything from just antivirus and anti malware and email security, all the way up to managed detection and response. So, you know, our company really focuses on small and mid market organizations. That are experiencing, you know, emerging growth and yet probably don't have the IT staff or expertise to help fuel that growth with technology. So very broad, kind of enterprise grade, world class grade set of services, but trying to provide that to smaller and mid market customers so that they can be competitive.

That's great.

Helping them level up.

You know, technology has continued to eat the world and now technology is eating technology, which is just, you know, I would say maybe AI has the potential to eat technology. Small businesses have to keep up. So I'm excited to spend a bit of the conversation talking about that with you, but take us through a little bit. Your background, you've worked in some large companies, some small, but I think tech has been a theme in most of your career, correct?

It has, yeah. Yeah, I've been very lucky, very lucky. I've got to do some, some really cool things with some really cool people at several different locations. So kind of started my career building business solutions in the wireless business. So worked for a couple of wireless companies and eventually ended up at Verizon where I was one of a small team of people that helped us integrate our cloud, security, wireless and business portfolio into what eventually became Verizon Enterprise Solutions. Jumped down to Dell back in my home state of Texas and helped them build a global mobility strategy and then actually help integrate and build a singular go to market strategy and brand for Dell software, which was about 22 different tech software platforms. Got a little burn on big tech. Decided to kind of start running my own shop and work for a small SaaS provider in the through channel marketing automation space and then another SaaS provider in the BPO space. And then I've been with Rapid Scale now for almost 18 months and have overseeing kind of the development of our new brand new go to market strategy. Built a full marketing infrastructure and you know, really responsible. I'm on the hook, I'm on the hook for driving explosive growth here at Rapid Scale.

Well, it's in the name, it's in the title and I think the environment is asking for it too. You know, it's been. The small business owner from pre Covid to now has been through a whipsaw, right. Of just you got to digitize everything. Oh, and now AI is here. What's the state of the customer? You think? What's, what is a small business owner going through on a day to day basis besides just trying to run their business?

Yeah, it's interesting because there's these conflicting forces. Right. Technology provides such an unbelievable opportunity for a small business to innovate and to be competitive. And at the same time, you know, every technology leader that we engage with talks about legacy technical debt, stagnant systems, workloads everywhere. They've got on prem colo, they've got some private cloud, some public cloud, the fact that their staffs are overwhelmed, the fact that their applications are not performing as well as they need to be, the fact that they're concerned about security vulnerability. So you know, technology to a large extent is chaos. And you know, when we talk to these folks that are running these technology shops, the business owners, right? So manufacturing, sales, service, they're saying hey, I need more technology solutions to help me improve my close rates and, and better engage with customers and drive higher csat. And yet it's just so difficult to manage. So that's really where Rapid Scale sees a tremendous opportunity to help organizations that have sort of lean IT teams is to help them use innovative technologies that often are only adopted by enterprise customers to help them simplify it, drive a lot of automation, to get rid of the administrative workload and allow their people then to focus on solutions for their line of business owners. And that's the unleash innovation piece where we're helping them upscale their applications, build more capacity to engage with customers and really innovate so that they can ultimately drive a competitive advantage.

It's pretty helpful if, if a, you know, small business owner can just, who has 20 fires going per day can just say here's the problem I've got or, or actually here's the solution I want. Help me figure out a path to that and you kind of become the trusted advisor as a company. So that's how I'm hearing it.

Yeah, Rapid Skill, you know, we, we, we're really investing a tremendous amount of effort into being able to help these medium sized companies take this leap. And so we have over 200 experts that are certified in over 1700 accreditations. And so we're talking everything about M365 and workforce collaboration all the way to, you know, AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud. So you know, the inability for folks because they're overwhelmed with administrative workload, the inability for them to kind of look out the window and think about hey, what should I be doing next? What does good look like? That's a big part of the focus of how we think we can help these businesses because they can come to us and they say, hey listen, I'm struggling, I'm not really sure which way to go. Let me tell you what's happening with our organization and then, you know, our experts and engineers are able to say, listen, we think the best choice for you is potentially private cloud solution or a public cloud solution. Hey, we've got to refactor your data braces or even potentially start an AI implementation. So it's, you know, it feels good to help companies that are trying to compete in the market find a better way to build solutions that are going to help actually drive business results.

Yeah, let's dive a little bit more into that, that kind of cloud. Especially related to this new AI environment. I'm guessing a lot of people are coming to you saying, hey, I hear I need AI, what do I do differently? And you're having to talk about what's reality versus what's good for you right now. What is happening in the hardware meets cloud world in this new AI environment.

Yeah, if we were to focus on AI. Listen, I don't know about your Google feed. My Google feed, 90% of it is on AI. It's obviously, you know, so pervasive and you know, what we're finding is that people don't even realize the benefits and how to, how to take advantage of it and consequently, you know, they don't really understand what goes into it. We have a tendency to think of AI like ChatGPT or, you know, many of the other kind of implementations that you can start utilize to, you know, create cool graphics on your own. But, you know, AI really takes a defined data strategy that, that's really the beginning. And so, you know, there are nine different use cases that we most particularly talk to customers about. It's about, you know, improving your customer engagement, you know, analyzing your sales. You can use it for logistics management there. So there's a lot of opportunities to use a large language model to help you pull data out of your organization and make better business decisions. But that's really the, you know, that's the cherry on top. What you've got to do first is foundationally you've got to build your data lake and data warehouse capability because you've got data, valuable data that is going to feed. It's the lifeblood of the large language model and you've got to unlock that. So, you know, rapid scale. We always start at the basics and we think about, hey, how do we unlock the data from all the different resources that you have and pull that into a data lake? We can then build you a large language model that can read that data, consume it, and then start visualizing and optimizing that data as you start making business decisions or if it's a chat bot that's going to engage with your customers, or if it's a scheduling system, or if it's a marketing automation system that you want to bring more intelligence to, we have a tendency to think, hey, let's use AI to improve results. But often it has to do with your entire infrastructure strategy. And so many folks are struggling with AI. They want to take advantage of it, but they don't know how, particularly again in that kind of small to mid market space. And so we built a full practice around generative AI. We've got an in house team with over 50 years of experience in AI implementations and a really significant number of projects going on right now that span everything again from logistics, supply chain, financial applications, marketing applications, customer engagement applications. So we've got a series of thought leadership pieces out called Practical AI and that's because again, we're trying to demystify the fact that it's something magic and really talk about the nuts and bolts technology that you need to build underneath it before it can actually do for you what you're hoping that it can.

That's great.

We'll, we'll link to some of those references here as well. In the show notes you get some great, you know, specific use case examples specifically in logistics in the sales automation and enablement space. Are there any specific industries that you're seeing are trending in, you know, unique ways of AI or just using it more and asking for it more than other industries within small business?

Listen, it, it has applications across every industry. We're seeing the biggest update adoption in healthcare, financial services and retail. You know, organizations that have a lot of customer engagement. Obviously, you know, one of the most practical ways to deliver capabilities is to have a large language model, pull all of your content together and be able to feed that to customers in an automated way. But again, you know, the use cases are fairly broad and so the ability to run optimization on the way your field teams are delivering products and services, when they're out installing say air conditioning units, there's a lot of applications there. Again, the focus for us is this all starts with a consultation. Every company that we talk to probably has a line, you know, 12 line items of things that they would like to do with AI. And what we really try and do is help them define what is the fastest path to immediate business impact before we start even developing kind of use case and prototypes for them.

So Sean, so much going on in hardware and in cloud, public cloud, private cloud, co location. How does a small business owner navigate all this.

Yeah, it's difficult as a matter of fact. And in fact, at the basis of a lot of the struggles that organizations are having, particularly when they're in that space where they're growing aggressively, they're small, they're becoming mid market, they're mid market, they're becoming large. It's about bringing some organization to their, to their infrastructure. And so you know, every CIO CTO that we talk to talks about the fact that they've got legacy workloads in a variety of different locations, they've got some stuff on prem, they've got some stuff in a colo, they've got some stuff in, you know, with maybe one hosted cloud, they're considering a move to aws and there's really no rhyme or reason to their strategy. And so that's really at the foundation of how Rapid Scale helps organizations, you know, to, to and why does this matter? Right? So if you've got workloads spread everywhere, you've probably got people that are constantly monitoring security patches and software updates. You've got these hardware refresh bills that show up from, you know, Dell or HP and they're like $3 million and your CFO says, hey, we're not paying $3 million. Figure out a way to do this differently. So the ability to turn this from a capex on prem investment that's highly administrative, workload focused and very difficult to manage to just an as a service fluid capacity. You turn up virtual machines and down virtual machines as you need them and you, you eliminate the CapEx cost, you turn this into a predictable monthly bill and then all of the security patches, software upgrades, all that stuff is outsourced. Right. Like we do it for you as part of the monthly fee. So, so you know, Rapid Scale is providing private cloud, you know, hosted cloud and public cloud solutions to around 2,000 customers right now, which is, you know, pretty significant all again in that, in that small to mid market space that they've got a lean IT team and they really need a lot of assistance. You know, our private cloud Solution, we have eight Tier 3 data centers. You know, we have tremendous capabilities and security wrapped in again, predictable bill, full outsourced security updates, you never have to worry about hardware cost again. And then, you know, we're one of the few providers out there that can help you make decisions on moving workloads to aws, potentially to Azure. And then we just launched our Google Cloud practice as well. So there's almost nobody that can give you private cloud, hosted cloud and then all Three public cloud hyperscalers as well. And our solutions around those are pretty extensive because often before you can move, you got to modernize the application that you have or you may want to even develop a new application. We'll probably have to refactor your entire databases that feed those applications to make sure that they'll transfer. We've got full migration services and then of course, you know, once you're there, we have what we call our cloud reliability portal, which actually will do currently, if you can believe this, we do 250 million automated remediations of cloud errors, either financial or security, and we remediate those arrows through automation every single month. So think about the workload that that takes off of your organization and then you know, we have a full finops. So if you already have a public cloud implementation, we can help you save money and manage it. Very easy. And then, you know, finally it's, it's, how do you start using this, this greater capacity, data integration and capability to start potentially using AI as well. But it's still, you know, Neil is still very complex and so Rapid Scale, you know, we've created something totally unique in the market. We call it Rapid Scale Interactive Explorer. And so this is a tool, just to be honest with you, you know, like PowerPoint really stinks, right? Like, I think everybody listening to your podcast is sick and tired of somebody sending them PowerPoint or sitting down with a salesperson and seeing a PowerPoint. So we created a fully interactive experience for IT leaders to go in and investigate challenges across their apps, data and AI layer, across their infrastructure layer, across their network layer, and across their devices and users layer. So the ability to look across your entire ecosystem, investigate and find the challenges that you're currently up against, and then see the solutions and use cases that Rapid Scale has executed against to help businesses simplify IT and unleash innovation. It's really, really cool. We actually just launched it yesterday and so, you know, if you're looking for a new way of getting a bird's eye strategic view of what your IT ecosystem really looks like and also where you need to go. It's a, you know, we're really proud of, you know, kind of building something that, that no one's ever seen before. Love it.

Our audience are total techies, obviously early adopters, so I'm sure they're excited to dive in and try a new tool, especially when it's just out. So we'll make sure we link it here in the show notes. How is cyber security keeping up in this in all of this, you know, as I'm sure there's AI with regard to, you know, cyber specifically implementations, but a lot of us are just dumping stuff into OpenAI personally chatgpt without regard for what's the data going to be out there for our personal info and all that. Like how does cyber security play its role in kind of this new era?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, cybersecurity, again, if you, if you go back to the initial premise, right, which is technology is literally the nervous system of your business. Just came out of a meeting earlier today where we were talking about cybersecurity and compliance regulation across healthcare, financial services and retail. But again, even if you're running a construction organization, which you would not think would have the need for a lot of cybersecurity, the fact of the matter is that you're taking in now post Covid there are digital ways that you're consuming your customers information. So even for a construction organization the initial quotes are going out electronically. Customers RFPs are coming in electronically, you know, the initial credit evaluations are coming in electronically. So cybersecurity is crucially important across the entire portfolio of your products and services. And that goes across almost every industry. Particularly when you think about things like phishing attacks which are indiscriminate in the way that they're trying to capture data from, particularly small business companies because they're often less sophisticated in their understanding of how to fight against phishing. There's ransomware attacks which are, can absolutely cripple and potentially run you out of business. We have a customer in New Orleans, First Lake Properties. They have about 800 multifamily units. And Christmas Day of last year their, their head of IT recognized something was happening in their systems and they actually had a ransomware attack mid process on Christmas Day morning, if you can believe it. And so they were starting to see their servers go offline. Of course they had a disaster recovery and backup solution from Rapid Scale and we were able to help recover all of their data and get them back up and running in less than 24 hours. Amazing performance of the Rapid Scale team during the crowdstrike outage, which was maybe the biggest IT outage ever. Just a few weeks ago our team helped dozens and dozens and dozens of customers. The outage happened I think at 12:30am we were on the phone with customers at like 1:30 or 2:00am that morning, helping them start to recover and get back up their systems. So cybersecurity is crucially, crucially important. Rapid Scale has built a portfolio again to help small and medium technology leaders strengthen their ability to exp. To respond to an evolving threat surface, but do it in a way where they're outsourcing it so that it's not requiring a tremendous amount of their bandwidth. You know, technology needs to continue to focus on business results. So a lot of the, a lot of the administrative. Right. Capabilities, the monitoring, the responses, the remediation, you know, we really feel like that's best outsourced. And so if you look at rapid scale cyber security portfolio, it starts with, you know, pretty basic stuff, right. Email security, we do antivirus, any malware. But we have, we also have managed detection and response. So we can see when someone's trying to get into your network. We can make the appropriate remediations to mitigate that risk. You know, we have managed firewall services, we have a full set of portfolios, a full set of cyber portfolio solutions for your public cloud implementations across aws, Azure and Google. We have vulnerability management as a service and we have security information and event management. So again, when you think about your individual users and protecting them all the way to your full infrastructure and protecting that, it's something that Rapid scale puts a lot of focus on and we're having a lot of success around.

That's great to hear. Yeah, the man, the CrowdStrike one was a crazy one. Probably still in people's minds and wow, I have people up at 1am just jumping on it, working on it. That's what you want in kind of a infrastructure as a service. You know, it's happening behind the scenes and just doing the job in a sense. It's kind of what we start to almost rely on our software to do that. But to have service act like that as well too, I think is really important and really strong without taking it for granted. Right. So it sounds like you have a good balance there in that regard of working with the small business, knowing the capabilities but also knowing when to ask for help. Because we've on a few podcasts with, you know, some Cox executives on cyber security with the people are sometimes the first vulnerability in the cybersecurity. Right. You open that email, you can have everything protected in the world. So you know, it's a human and technology play to, to help our businesses. And it sounds like that's what Rapid skill is up to.

Yeah, listen, they're getting more and more sophisticated. I mean you're now seeing all these types of emails that come through to say hey, your delivery is going to be there tomorrow. Please confirm your address. And you know, you're like, what? Delivery? I got a call, actually got a call a couple days ago where people say, hey, listen, someone just bought a MacBook Pro on your Amazon account. And you know, we're from Amazon and we want to confirm with you that you didn't order this. And so I said, well, no, I didn't order a MacBook Pro. And they said, well, we need to just confirm your bank account information. And so but I have to test you. I have to make sure that this is you. So then he, then this person read off like 15 different banks and said, can you select the bank that you actually have as a backup, your Amazon account? At which point I said, yeah, guys, we don't have a bank account associated with an Amazon account. Thank you so much. But very sophisticated, very. I mean, you know, hey, listen, I, I should know better. But he had me on the phone for a full minute.

So anyway, yeah, I know. I mean, at the end of the day, businesses are run by people and, you know, we are only as strong as we have the attention span for, especially as business owners who have 10 things going on at this at any given moment, that's for sure. So when you hear stuff like that, it's good to have a team behind you. This being the tacos and tech podcast, the people have to know, does Sean have a favorite taco spot?

That is such a hard question because, you know, I'm a Texan, right? And so, you know, Tex Mex is the greatest Mexican food in the world. And Texas has by far the best selection of tacos in the world. Sorry folks, if you're from another part of the country, shots fired, it's, it's hard, it's hard to answer that question being from Texas, because there are so many places that I love. But in Dallas, there's a family owned Mexican restaurant out with a series of locations. It started in like, if I'm not mistaken, 1947, called El Phoenix. Well, and so El Phoenix just has kind of traditional crispy tacos, you know, just like not fancy, right? Just ground meat, lettuce, tomato salsa, sour cream. And they're just absolutely phenomenal. I can't even describe to you how good they are. But then there's a place in Austin called Teo Dan's Puffy Tacos. And those tacos are kind of more of a puff shell. They're pretty amazing. They're pretty amazing as well. So, yeah, I would have to say, you know, either Elphinix or Tio Dance.

Oh, great ones for sure. We're new to the tacos and tech taco database, which we love. For me, a Southern California taco fan and Mexican barrio barrio Biria tacos. Love hearing new styles. For me, all I know of Tex Mex is queso. Like any queso is good for me. So let's meet up sometime for some teodan and. And queso for tacos. Halfway between us in the country here.

You bet.

John, it's great to have you on. Really appreciate your wisdom here and thanks for being on Tacos and Tech podcast.

Yeah, listen, great to be with you and thanks so much.

Cheers. Thanks.

Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is all smashed for the green guacamole keeper Counting counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coating yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero gotta shout out to coast angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get for when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana St. Be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon hashtag SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

Startup skip the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

You want tech in tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it hey.

Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it hey it.