Connecting Customers to the Cloud with Jared Ruth and Ron Lev

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, and I'm really excited to be joined by two experts in cloud and the digitization of work from Cox Business and rapid scale, Jared Ruth and Ron Lev. Guys, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Thanks, Neil. We're excited to be here.

Likewise. Thanks, Neil.

Absolutely. Guys, we go back, we've been working, building the tech scene, building tech for a number of years now and it's really exciting to talk about where that's kind of culminated in a number of products that you guys have been building from listening to the ecosystems. What are tech companies needing? And I'm really excited to dive into all that that you've been building. First, though, how are you guys doing? I haven't seen you in so long in person. Everyone okay? Ron, you good?

Yeah, everyone's okay. Been busy working from home. The home office in the basement. So unlike you guys, we didn't see the sun most of the year. But, you know, looking forward it now that we're vaccinated and things are getting back to normal.

Glad to hear it. Jared, how are you doing?

Great. Yeah, it's been definitely an interesting year. I've heard, you know, the words new normal and all these other things way too much. So I am excited to get back into the office. But, you know, a lot of good things have happened too. Working from home and just reconnecting with friends and family and, you know, seeing even co workers in a new light. It's been pretty neat actually. Kind of getting to know people in a different way. So, you know, although I'm excited to get back into the office, definitely, definitely have learned a lot of things over the last year.

Totally understand. You guys have both have been longtime telecom execs, you know, helping really push the boundaries of where telecom went from broadband to even before that. Cannot even believe, like, what you saw in terms of tech adoption over the last year from necessity, not just from people saying, yeah, I want to try the latest tech. Can you give us some light on that, Jared, of just like looking back on seeing telecom grow and just what it has felt like over the last 12, 15 months during the pandemic?

Yeah, I mean, when you think about just over the last even, I mean, I won't go back all the way, but Even the last 20 years, you know, when cable modems first started, you know, we started having cable modems and we were on dial up, et cetera. Then to see this, how it's evolved into wireless, you know, who knew, right, that, you know, wireless would come along and cell phones and just, you know, then in the last five years, just how, how much things have changed, right? We, we went from, you know, all being in the office, essentially, to now, almost nobody being in the office. And that, that happened in like a month. I know at Cox, we, you know, we have a little over 55,000 employees, and within a month's time, we had pretty much 95% of our workforce working from home or remote in some kind of fashion. So. So yeah, when you think about that pace of change and then you add in things like AI and blockchain and everything else into the conversation, it's just unbelievable. The rate of change now. It's something obviously we've never seen before.

So it's interesting to say you've never seen before. But if you were to have been around long enough to be cocks from the beginning to end, you would have seen some of these things. Right. Like the company itself has seen some crazy change. How does that feel, you know, watching everything around you technology iterate but a company saying we're going to weather a storm for the next hundred years besides the last hundred.

Yeah, it's a great question and you know, it was really fascinating. So as you know, I mean we've been around for over 120 years. Founded in 1898 and you know, James Cox was a visionary in so many ways and he was, he was an innovator. And when you think about what it takes to stay relevant in a technology related industry, and again you go back to 1898, technology was sort of newspapers and media and you know, hard to believe now but to stay relevant for that long in this type of environment is tough to do. And so you know, when you think about our history and what it's taken to do that, it's just always looking at trends, always understanding what's coming. And that's what I think Cox has done a really good job of, is sort of understanding those trends being out in front of them and they're doing the same thing now where they're innovating in new ways. Obviously, you know, we have a significant presence in the auto industry so we're thinking about, you know, how do we innovate in the auto side with virtual auctions and all kinds of things there, but then also as you know, getting into things like clean tech, getting into health care and what healthcare is going to look like moving forward. So yeah, it's beyond just the technology, it's just staying in front of those trends and being relevant.

It's pretty incredible to stay the course over that period of time, but also to have, I don't want to call it a luxury but just have that ability to say we're going to make long term investments like that. And I think you and I have always related to the startup community in that regard too. Right. Building a business like a Startup is a 10 year plus bet in talent in the ecosystem around you and in the technology adoption that you hope finally comes up to speed 10 years later. And that's what a big 55,000 person company can embrace as well too. So pretty cool to have those similarities and be able to relate like that.

And where I love. I'm glad we have Ron on today as well because he's the one that's part of Our strategy team and is really looking at these trends and understanding where the market's going and helping to make some of those investments, which is pretty exciting.

Yeah. It's a perfect segue to really talk through Ron. Luckily we met before the pandemic. You were already working on a whole bunch of new strategies, new technologies. Do you want to give us a little bit kind of the background of what some of those investments and technologies that Cox was doing pre pandemic, even?

Yeah. So I think coming from the strategy organization and thinking about what should the cable company do next beyond, you know, our standard set of services. Right. Voice, video, and some of the moves we did with acquiring rapid scale and starting really, you know, the journey into the cloud enablement. Right. There's other peers. So if we think about rapid scale and what they're doing in helping SMBs and smaller businesses to sort of start their digital cloud transformation journey. Right. And supporting them because they don't have the skills in house. And me trying to take, you know, a larger set of cloud like products or infrastructure and saying, how can we plug that into some of our assets and properties in order to unlock other benefits, benefits for enterprises and our Internet customers to enhance them with sort of another evolution of the cloud, which is sort of this local, regional cloud and bringing it there. Because, you know, with the pandemic, like you said before. Right. A lot of things shifted to home. There's been a lot of privacy consideration and there's regulation that's been rolled into different states. Right. So the cloud is a great place. Right. But the cloud is not everywhere. And how do you actually interact with the cloud is really impactful to the way you do your business. So I think our ability to sort of bring the cloud closer to users and to our customers opens up additional capabilities that businesses potentially haven't thought through, given some of the constraints of the public cloud as it's today. Right.

Yeah. And it's the lifeblood obviously of the tech and startup world. But new to, still crazy to think, new to many businesses just joining the cloud. Do you want to give us just kind of set the stage a little bit about how we're seeing cloud apply to small medium businesses and even just give us an overview of what cloud computing is and kind of how you're approaching it from that regard.

So, you know, I think, you know, generally speaking, we kind of place businesses into three buckets. People that haven't, haven't gotten or haven't started moving to the cloud yet. Everything is still, you know, on premise and you know, on computers, in their networks and whatnot, we've got people that are sort of somewhere in the middle. They're moving, they're thinking about moving it, or maybe they've got some SaaS applications and whatnot, and they're starting to make that transition. And then we have, you know, organizations that are, you know, fully, you know, converted and moved over and using cloud technologies, whether it be, you know, the infrastructure, whether it be disaster recovery as a service, things like that. But unfortunately, well, and actually, fortunately, right, every business, every journey is a little bit unique. And so while we love to, as technology professionals and marketers and things like that, we love to be able to throw everybody in three buckets and say, there you go. It's that simple. It's just not. You've got so many companies that are on a very different journey to what it means to virtualize and what it means to enable remote employees. And so when I think about the last year, it just, it really forced everybody into this, in, in some ways almost a panic of, oh, my gosh, I've got to figure this out quickly. And what I, I think has happened is, is, you know, when you think about business in general, there's always been this concept out there of, hey, you know, fake it till you make it. Just go, and you'll figure it out over time, and at some point it's going to look really great. The fact of the matter is, is you can't fake it till you make it anymore. First of all, things are moving way too fast, so you don't have the time to go fake it till you make it. Beyond that, the liability is way too high. So when you start thinking about what it looks like to go try things out and try to shift back and forth between vendors, that may mean that you put your business in jeopardy. If you're a service provider, you may be putting somebody else's business in jeopardy. And that's not just because of user error and things. Now we've got ransomware and all kinds of things that are, that are taking me. We see it in the news every day. A different company got hit with a ransomware attack. All of your assets are encrypted. And then you're trying to figure out what your strategy is at that point, which, again, at that point, it's sort of too late, right? Your business is down, you know, in every day, or in some cases every hour is critical. So the way that this last year has accelerated the need for these services, first of all, but also the need for Somebody who truly understands how to deploy them and support them. It's exploded very different than where we were a year and a half ago.

You touched on a good point on the implementation piece. Because the big players in cloud are pretty big brand names like Google and Amazon and Microsoft that we know. Just when we think in the tech world think of cloud. But cloud is just like a place where something is stored, everything else, the connection, the security, all the way up to the line, literally plugged into someone's computer goes a long way. Can you take us through that kind of differentiation that you're thinking through in that regard?

Yeah, I think demystifying the term cloud a little bit, it's one of those terms that I think gets overused in some ways. Really all the cloud is a bunch of servers that'll live in a data center somewhere. Virtualization is key to that because basically you want to make sure that when you're connecting to a cloud environment that you do have the backup and you have all the things that are important to make sure that your data is secure and whatnot. And you mentioned, I mean, I think when you think about the hyperscalers like you mentioned, aws, Microsoft, Google Cloud, they provide an incredible service and they do a great job of providing that protection in those environments where they kind of fall short, if I could say so, is if you don't know how to migrate to the cloud and then once you're there, you don't know how to support your environment and you may just be unsure. Where you're going to have a challenge is just on the back end support, like getting in touch with somebody, having somebody help you make that migration from your local servers over to their environment. That's just not really how they're set up. They're set up more for, you know, hey, I know what I need. I'm going to go buy this cpu, this memory, this storage, I know how to interact that way. Then you can do a lot with the hyperscalers. But when you really need that personalization, when you need a phone, a friend, then you really need to think about what that looks like. A managed provider. And the good thing is managed providers can give you that access to the large hyperscaler environments, but they can also create kind of a hybrid scenario which makes you really comfortable with sort of your on prem assets versus what you store in the cloud. And then Ron brought up a great point. It's a hard to believe, but we're starting to live in a world where like 60 milliseconds is too slow. And it's, you know, that's hard to fathom, right, when you think about milliseconds and what that means. But we're also starting to see a need for like this ultra low latency, you know, cloud environment that users can get to. And that's really important. As we think about IoT, Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles, driving systems, etc. Latency, a low latency solution becomes really important.

And to pick up on what Jared was saying about latency, right? Like, yes, we have the interesting use case around autonomous vehicles and iot, but just think about the daily life activities of us now during the pandemic, right? Like the contactless experience, right? Cashing out. All those things are driven by, you know, some device that knows you're there or some device that scans your phone to get to transact you through Apple pay or Samsung pay or one of those, right. And all those things go back and forth to other systems that are placed somewhere on some cloud. So there are delays, right? And if the world, or at least beyond the pandemic, we will still have an incremental of, you know, 20, 30% of this digital, you know, life that we're living, right? And the experiences that we need to go through, right? You would want the experience to be faster, right? You want people in a line doing Apple Pay checking out faster than what it was with the cashier or them scanning it with the kiosk or something like that, right? Or when you go online and everybody's at home and it's Christmas or Thanksgiving and everybody's doing shopping, you want your cart experience to be flawless. You want the cart space to flow. You don't want those hang ups. You want that when you do a filter on a search on Amazon or on the fly or travel website, right. That, that those results will just come in instantaneously, right? So sort of this waiting patient problem, right? Like me and Jared, we go a long way in this ISP industry, right? Back from the early 2000, right? So first company I worked for, we did video on cell phones. We're the first company to do that. And 3G wasn't there yet, right? So and the video was, you know, five frames of a talking head. But today everybody's getting 4K to his phone. So the jump was amazing, right? And back then we were waiting on cable. The first cable model probably to load just the Google page took a few seconds, right? If not 20 seconds, right? But today, if a website refresh rate or a load time takes more than 10 seconds, like the customer is already gone, right? It's just going to move to the site that actually loads up. So I think latency have a direct impact to that. And actually with latency, physical distance correlates directly with that, right? So the further you are from those clouds, right, or where those servers are placed, your experience will be slower. Nothing to fix that physics, right. And the only way is to start moving those workloads closer to where the data is being created or the data is being consumed. So the experience continues to be flawless. And thinking about, you know, my kids and probably your kids who will grow up in our world that, you know, tablets, you know, you probably have 10, 15 of those at home, right? They will be used to just like I need to touch something, right? And the iPad, right? You click, something happens. But you remember the PCs back in the day, right? You clicked on an application, you waited like a minute for it to load, right? You used dial up. It took you hours to get a website or download a file. But today, if it's not instantaneous, people lose their patient and they turn or move to the next app. So how this user experience impacts adoption, the adoption and usage of digital experience will be crucial in the future, Right?

I love that. Ron, you know, five years ago, to your point, I never would have dreamed that my children would be screaming about packet loss and latency on the network. And you know, it's been that way for the last couple of years as some of these games have put some of those metrics on their interfaces. You know, even children now understand the importance of latency and packet loss, boss. And what that means to their experience. Great point.

Yeah. And I think, you know, with the kids today, right, like they don't have this point of view, that stuff doesn't really work very well. Right. Like it's all very complicated and for us, right, like we used to hack around stuff, we, we understand the mechanics of the things. But you know, the users of today, they just want to experience, they just want to consume. So the networks, the applications, the infrastructure players, they all need to support that sort of new generation of application and new generation of users.

I think something's interesting that's about that is that we are relying on pretty old school infrastructure for a lot of things to keep this up. And I think Cox, you guys specifically can relate to the need for infrastructure locally because you're literally plugging people in at their houses. What's pretty cool that you're talking about is that you're finding these pieces of infrastructure, these assets to Rent, retool them, and be makers of tomorrow. Allowing people of tomorrow's camera vision systems and checkout spots using local infrastructure and assets around that. That's pretty unique. It feels like it's pretty cool. Do you want to speak more to that?

Yeah, Well, I mean, to your point, you know, the infrastructure side of it, we all weren't from a sort of a copper environment to a fiber, you know, environment as we upgraded and whatnot. And again, you know, even with fiber, we sort of went from 100 megs to gig to 100 gigs to 400 gigs, you know, so also including, you know, how we can expand that through technologies like dense wave division, multiplexing and things like that. But that's all the physical layer, which is great, but it's really about the applications that you're enabling over that. Right. And so the neat thing, the neat perspective that we have is being the company that lays the infrastructure in that physical layer all the way up through delivering the application applications is a really powerful place to be. Right. So I think there's a lot of players in the industry who really understand applications. They really understand routing or they really understand switching in the networks and whatnot. But we have a really unique perspective as a service provider through solution provider. We had a recent project in Las Vegas where we did a large project. I think Ron may have some more information on this too, but where we're enabling some smart city applications that have never been done before. Right. And so, you know, a lot of this is, is some cutting edge technology that we're enabling for our customers. And because of the way that we're set up, you know, we've got the ability to understand sort of what challenge a customer is trying to solve and then sort of custom tailor a solution to meet that need. And again, a lot of companies just, just aren't able to do that. And so, you know, I, I feel pretty fortunate to work for a company that sort of approaches situations like that. It's like, okay, you know, it's not, we can't, it's. Okay, let's, let's think about this. How do we solve this problem in a way that makes sense for the customer and could potentially solve problems for a lot of other customers that are, you know, prospective customers that are having the same issues.

No, absolutely true. And I think, Jared, like, if I just think. But that's more of your domain, like the investments we even do on the Indra Internet infrastructure, not just for the businesses, but just for the residential consumers that we have. Right, like that's been a lot of the investment that Cox has been doing through the years is just keeping those network current. Right. And the pipes big enough to support all the new application and content that people are using. Right. And consuming.

Yeah, that's a great point. And we saw a significant increase this last year as people moved, you know, both from a work perspective and a school perspective. Working from home, learning from home, we saw such a significant increase in usage on our networks. And, you know, shout out to our technical teams and our engineering teams who, you know, seeing this explosive growth, you know, we're out there all during the pandemic doing infrastructure upgrades, doing, you know, fiber upgrades, making sure that our network was up and running. You know, it's a tough job. It's a tough job anyway, you know, to be out there doing that work. But to do it, you know, all throughout an international pandemic, major shout out to our technical crews for doing that for us and for our customers.

Yeah, we can only imagine how much, how many hours they were putting in there in the beginning when that was happening, probably still today. One thing that they're doing out there, though, is they're getting hungry and they're eating tacos. Luckily, they were out there. We're making tacos at home, they're out eating tacos on the street, but luckily everyone's eating tacos. Is the tacos and tech podcast. We got to know what are your favorite spots? I know you guys are in different geos, but what's your favorite taco? Where you guys are at?

Oh, man, that's. That's a tough question, Neil. So I'll. I'll start with. I'll start with San Diego. And there's. There's a bunch of them. You know, I haven't been. I haven't been back. I actually live in San Clemente, as you know, in Orange County. But I would say my. Go to Tacos. El Gordo City Taco, Lucha Libre. Salud. Mike's Taco Club. I love Oscars, you know, and then just any carniceria slash market I can go into to try to try things, I would probably do that. You know, up where I live, there's actually a great little market by my house. It's called SC Ranch Market. San Clemente Ranch Market. And it's, it's in the back of a. Of a regular market, but they just make the best al pastor tacos. And I like to get there early because that's when like, all the good crust is like baked on and you get all the all the, you know, all the spices and the pineapple and nutmeg and all the other. I don't, I don't know what all they put in there, but it's amazing. I love them, but I, I don't know, there's just so many. It's hard. You can't just pick one.

It's all right. I'll allow a few. I'm going to have to come up to San Clemente to come try those. Those sound amazing.

Oh, they are, yeah. Yep. Definitely make a stop.

Ron, how about you?

So I'll go with something. So we have, you know, we're on the side, on the other side of the country, right. So tacos is not very, you know, our common go to food here in, in Atlanta, but there is one good place. It's a part of a franchise, but it's always good. You know, you want to grab a lunch outside of the office. The place called Thin Lizzy, right by the Atlanta hq. But there is one also similar to Jared. Right. It's part of the Corona Soria. It's called Kernis area, Los Pinos. And it's right here down the street. So it's a more authentic one that we usually go to.

I love it. Tacos connecting us coast to coast.

That's right.

That's what it's all about. Well, guys, I really appreciate it you guys joining the podcast also how much you've been building in the community over the years and now now find a new product to meet the need. So thank you for that and thanks again for being on.

Absolutely. Thank you, Neil.

Thank you, Neil.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast network where we. We are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co Working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eealbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos in tech pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want checking tacos, tacos in tech. You know, we got it.

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