How Technology Will Change the Workplace in 2022 with Rebecca Rosen

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party startups get the.

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 Bloom, 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. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount. And welcome back to the Tacos in Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am joined by Rebecca Rosen, Director of Field Marketing at Cox Business. Hey Rebecca, thanks for joining us.

Hey Neil, it's so great to be here.

I know it's nice to see you. We obviously wish it was in person, but we will take it for sure. Get to spend a little bit of time with you. So we're going to talk a little about trends that we're seeing in the workplace for businesses, how they've been grappling with the last 18 months and how they're planning for the year ahead. Can't believe we're already planning for 2022, but your team within Cox Business has really seen where companies have kind of hit the road and how they've figured out how to handle their whole teams hybrid in person. All the above is totally up in the air for everyone. And so want to get a little bit of insights from you from what you guys have learned, but also want to get to know a little bit of your background. You mind giving us a little bit of your scoop of kind of where you grew up and how you found your way into this great telecom world?

Well, that's a crazy story in and of itself and could probably take our entire podcast, so that'll be for another time. But I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area right outside the Beltway in Reston, Virginia. I came out here after graduate school and my degree is actually in choreography and the integration of technology. And so that's where we can have a lot of really fun conversations. But moved out here to work with a very famous choreographer who I discovered I did not like. And then it became a question about, well, how the heck do I pay my rent in California? And so it became time to get a regular job. And that regular job led me to tech. My first job was working for a boutique consultancy, think Accenture, but 75 people. And that's where I started learning all about tech. And from there, some of the friends that I had met there made their way to TelePacific TPX, and I spent 13 years there. By the time I left, I was overseeing marketing and sales training. Since that time, I spent some time consulting for the likes of VMware and Apple and a number of brands that would be pretty well known. Ended up what I call delusions of grandeur. On the consulting side, I thought I could go out, do it on my own work half the time, make twice the money. And I discovered it was working twice the time, making half the money because, you know, you finish one gig and then suddenly you got to find your next. So I decided to come back internal and ultimately that led me to Cox. So I've been with Cox since the beginning of 21, and I've been just having an incredible experience. And here I lead both marketing and product for California. I've been in Southern California for about 20 years now, and San Diego has a very special place in my heart.

Oh, well, real quick. We actually have some, a lot of cross paths. My family, my mom specifically grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, so not far from Reston. I know you spent some time in the San Fernando Valley. Is that correct?

Yes, I have. Yep.

That's where I'm born and raised. Here we are now in Southern Southern California or as we call Orange County, Northern California compared to San Diego.

So what we need to do is dig through our pictures and actually find those places where we've been in each other's pictures. We just haven't even realized it yet.

Yeah, seriously, that's true. What's the connection with San Diego as well?

Well, being part of Tele Pacific, right. Our footprint at the time was really California based and a lot of our business was throughout Orange coast and San Diego. Additionally, my grandparents, ever since I was 10 was in Arizona. And you know what the grandparents do? They come out to San die when it gets too hot in the summertime. So growing up we'd spend a lot of time in the San Diego.

Oh yeah, we know when the zonies are here for sure. Well, I love it. Well, you've, I mean you've definitely had your hands full in the tech community for sure. A lot of insights that you're now pouring back into helping companies through a variety of ways through Southern California. So that is awesome. Gotta ask, you know, and this is almost like a standard question at this point, like what's the last 18 months been for you? But curious from your perspective where you're interacting with so many businesses large and small, some retail, some tech. What are you hearing from them over the last, I don't know, 18 months or so? Feedback to you guys.

I think we've seen more change in the last 18 months than we really have. Through the majority of my career. I can remember coming into 2019 and we'd be talking about cloud and saying cloud adoption. We'll finally get to some percentage of penetration by 2031, let's say. And suddenly in a year and a half, the penetration that we thought would occur over the next next decade really occurred in 18 months. The amount of learning that it decision makers had to take on, the amount of learning that just business leaders had to take on to adopt, to not only, you know, new infrastructures, but new ways of doing business, interacting with employees, just crazy amount of change. And you know, I'd say for anybody who's weathered that entire storm, I mean really, we don't say this enough. Just a huge round of applause to everybody because I just, you know, don't really realize that we understand how much, not only how much change we've gone through, but the fact that we've so many of us have gone through it and have come out on the other side of it.

Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, it's been a whirlwind, but you're right. The learning, the education just was mandatory where for so long it's had to been, you know, education was a nice to have. You really have to work hard to educate your clients. You know, it's kind of nice that we've had adoption.

Sure. On the business side, you know, we saw a number of companies struggling just with COVID So, you know, depending on what it was, it was a question of how are you going to drive revenues? You know, are you going to be able to keep your doors open through different times during the pandemic when, you know, suddenly you couldn't go anywhere, you weren't allowed to do certain things? You know, we saw a lot of companies applying for the paycheck protection program. We saw a number of those companies get their loans and apply them towards being able to support their businesses in those times. You know, I think a lot of people went through, you know, some fear, uncertainty and doubt and, you know, have come out the other side pretty strong. And some others are probably kneeled back in your, you know, area trying to think about, okay, what's next, you know, based on the challenges that we saw, where are the problems and how can I dig in and build solutions for them and, you know, become the next new power company, I suppose.

Yeah, totally. Got to imagine from the infrastructure that you guys have invested into pre Covid, which was really make sure the office place is the kingdom, right. To a certain regard, you then had to take that and distribute to everyone's house. For a lot of businesses, a lot still had to keep running, but now in a safe way. Right. But I'm curious, like, what is the. I don't know. What's the reaction now in terms of infrastructure investment that looking back at what you did, how do you change that, what you are doing going forward?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the company's invested some $15 billion in our infrastructure. And over the next several years, we have a commitment to invest another $10 billion in our infrastructure. I think one of the things that we see is that this idea that hybrid doesn't go away suddenly because we are now able in many parts. And thankfully in San Diego, we've been doing so well that we're able to go back to the office. But if you're like what we're seeing, maybe 50% of those employees are coming back to the office and the other 50% aren't either. They don't want to. They still have childcare items that they need to take care of. Whatever it is, they're still looking, you know, you're not getting that complete back to office. So then the question becomes, how can I give them that office experience that is the same regardless of whether I've crossed that threshold to the front door or not? So, you know, it really becomes about, you know, from a product perspective, from serving businesses, it becomes about how can we offer employees the same experience and a seamless experience, whether they're at home or they're at work. And I think, you know, one of the things that we've always known from an IT perspective is if you're going to introduce a new application into the business, then that often comes with bandwidth requirements. It might even come with RAM requirements for your computers. Right. We all went to some sort of a CRM in the past 10 or 15 years and suddenly we all needed new laptops or desktops or whatever we had at the time. Bandwidth is no different. We know that the demand for bandwidth isn't going anywhere. And so the more applications you put into the environment, you put into the cloud you want to have accessible, the more bandwidth you need. So, you know, there are kind of a few different things that are happening here. One is that seamless experience. So can you offer that ubiquitous experience at home and at work, right. That deals with your phone services, your collaboration services. So things like, you know, do your phone services interact with, whether you're using WebEx or Teams or other collaboration services like that? Can people reach me no matter where I am? So can I get instant messaging through my business telephone numbers, again, using those same types of collaboration services? And then what's the bandwidth like to support my cloud services or even potentially the services I have in my data center? And am I able to get closer to that data center, data center through things like edge services that enable faster connections with lower latency. And we're going to continue and continue to see kind of that drive towards the edge more and more. So that's going to be increasingly important as companies move forward.

That's an awesome overview of all the different kind of products that you're supporting companies with. I think the bandwidth is a big one. Where many of us pre Covid, you know, for home, we didn't think about having the fastest bandwidth. It was whatever is just enough, right. To run Netflix maybe. Right. But now it's a whole different thing, that's for sure.

Well, and frankly, at businesses that's been, you know, that's been the case. I often say from a business perspective, you know, our industry did a little bit of a disservice. You know, in 1998 when we were offer, we were able to offer competitive services, it was often the telecom salespeople that would go in and say look, we can offer it to you for like, for like at less. The result of thus though oftentimes means that you may not have optimized your bandwidth, you may be on different types of infrastructure that don't support the types of business needs that you have. And so really looking at the criticality of your applications across your network and serving your employees and your customers everywhere they are, suddenly it really shouldn't be about like for like at last. It really should be where are you and your employees and your customers going to get that best experience?

Yeah, totally agree. And the fact that the investment piece that your tech team does, I want to actually give a little case study around that. When Ron Lev, CTO of Innovation came out three years ago now to survey the San Diego scene, he immediately heard from ctos locally that said we need a faster cloud connection and that he took it back and poof, Cox Edge was born. Which is now, I think San Diego is one of the first markets to have Edge cloud services, which is pretty cool considering we're such an IOT and fintech and retail tech, kind of heavy kind of deployment of drone tech, those kinds of things need quick and cheap service in a sense to run these compute. So that's been a pretty cool investment to be a part of to watch that Cox actually listens to what the tech community wants to and used existing hardware, last mile kind of stuff to build that out. Where else are you seeing that kind of investment pay off in any specific industries within the communities that you serve?

It's interesting. Beyond Edge services, there's been a lot of investment in both healthcare and hospitality along with government municipalities. So what I mean I think that your audience, your listeners are going to find some of this cool, but a lot of this has to do with machine to machine learning and the Internet of things. So from a hospital perspective on the Cox business side, have something called Procyte. And Procyte is the IOT of hospitals where we're able to help hospitals manage their inventories of equipment and things like, like that things that would often take quite a bit of time by quite a number of employees and help them understand what's working at the time, what's not working at the time, those sorts of things. From a hospitality perspective, we Have a whole group on hospitality networks that are looking to make that experience for the guest that much better, whether it's from, you know, their video services or their check in services, those sorts of things. And from when I'm saying a municipality perspective, I'm thinking about building cities. So things like managing streetlights and whether all of those streetlights are on or not, and rather than having one of your citizens have to call in to report that a streetlight is out, actually knowing that and being able to monitor it from a centralized location, there's just some really, really cool things that are going on from an Internet of things perspect. I think, you know, we've been talking about the Internet of things for a long, long time. I've seen the application of it in a few things. Right. I used to see the application of IT in the Central Valley and agriculture. You know, there's been some use cases here and there that if you have a very strong IT team that can do a lot of application development, they've been rolling it out. But otherwise I haven't really seen the broader application. I think we're starting to see that broader application today.

Got it just from my knowledge of knowing how Cox invests because it's a private company and network. These are like long, long term investments that they're like looking ahead and making. So it's pretty cool to see it come to fruition. Especially now on, like, you're talking about the smart city front. Smart city is not like Iot, not just a buzzword anymore. Like it's actually happening and maybe the pandemic helped with that. So thank you to one little silver lining. But what areas are still struggling? And especially from knowing our community of builders who want to lean and look for opportunities to help. Like, are you seeing certain, certain industries that are still struggling to kind of come up to current day of where we are at in recovery?

Well, you know, it's interesting. We were just looking at the most recent COVID 19 data. You know, we're still analyzing the impacts of what's been happening and what continues to occur. And certainly we've seen growth where growth had been stagnated over the past couple of years. So things like hospitality, restaurants, those sorts of things, healthcare, obviously those have all been growing. When I was looking at the data, I think the thing that was really interesting to me was to see food stores specifically, so grocery stores, some of the equipment for gyms and things like that, they're starting to struggle. If you think about it, at the beginning of the pandemic Anybody who had any kind of disposable income went out and bought all of the equipment they could. We bought an elliptical. I have a Pilates reformer. Well, I bought them during the pandemic and quite frankly, I know we got the elast elliptical in our city and then it took months for anybody to be able to get the next one. So, you know, people have, have purchased that. But now that people are going back to gyms, back to some form of normalcy, those industries now are starting to take a hit. Because what they saw in 2021, you know, is starting to be more normalized towards what it was like in 2019.

Interesting.

Yeah, I find that really interesting as well. And certainly while we say things like hospitality are improving, they're nowhere near where they were prior.

It was hard for them to make the investment when they were the ones taking the hit business wise. Right. Like you couldn't. Yeah, you couldn't virtualize hotel beds. You couldn't, like you said, virtualize a gym. Well, maybe a little bit. Like you could offer classes online, but you couldn't make the same kind of dollar investment that tech companies and others had to do to keep their business running. So that totally makes sense and absolutely an opportunity there for the community to kind of lean in and help. Are you seeing that kind of response from community saying, let's look and see where we can lend a hand?

You know, I am. I'm seeing so much work that's being done from a community's perspective. I mean, it's really amazing knowing how our communities came. Cox, we have specific pillars that we really focus on. Inclusion, equity and diversity is certainly one of them. Narrowing the digital divide in education is another. You know, the digital divide continues to be a big issue and we've seen a number of both individuals and companies leaning in. I think during the pandemic there were many conversations when the schools were shut down. Sorry. Many examples where the school systems would take buses into territories just to enable WI fi access for students that may not actually have Internet access. We certainly contributed towards giving companies or people students laptops and ensuring that they had the tools that they needed to be able to continue with their learning. We were offering free Internet services, free school supplies, all of those sorts of things. You know, we've aligned ourselves. You know, we do a lot of work, let's say, with the Boys and Girls Clubs and they've been doing tremendous work. Just to hear the stories that they've been doing in order to support their communities from things like food banks, to enabling, you know, even during the pandemic, enabling childcare for first responders and are continuing to need to do that work. So, you know, we're trying definitely to close the gap, you know, building out the infrastructure, getting to more communities where they may not be served by things like Internet access, continuing with our programs to enable our residents, you know, just residents of our community, not necessarily Cox customers, but, you know, enable the education of children and really kind of, you know, meet their needs in a very meaningful way. And, you know, again, you asked about how others can lean in. There are so many opportunities. So whether, you know, quite frankly, Neil, you have people reach out to me or, you know, reach out to any one of our community partners, I'm sure there are a thousand ways and a thousand people that you can talk to about how people can lean in and help.

Totally true. And that's not just a quote. Like, that's real, like connecting people actually does do stuff in these times, and we're happy to do it, that's for sure.

Well, you know, and I think for the last 18 months, so many of us have been so lonely. I mean, we've been fortunate that, you know, for some of us, we've got our close friends nearby, we have our family nearby, but that doesn't matter. It still feels lonely and isolated. So to know that you can help and that you're doing some good for others, sometimes it helps kind of our own personal hurt to be able to, you know, lean in and help others.

Totally agree. Thanks for that. And it's. It's real. We will get actually people who will reach out and we will make sure everyone's connected. Help us plan 2022 a little bit, how the businesses that. That are thinking about, really, I mean, it's tough to think about a whole year to plan for, but let's just take the beginning of 2022. Any. Any tips for businesses on what they can be doing?

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I'd say that there are probably a number of things. I think first and foremost is it's time to get rid of any of the latency in your network. And there are so many opportunities to be able to do that. So whether it's through edge services, it may be through infrastructure as a service, and if you have infrastructure as a service, you know, making sure that you can connect to that edge in a very easy, resilient way. Also ensuring, you know, from an employee perspective that they do have that ubiquitous experience. So I don't have to as an employee, give my cell number to, you know, my customers because I may not be working from the office that day. Really, I can take whatever device I want with me and whether it's my laptop, my cell phone or, you know, my desk phone, if we're still using them, I'm providing that ubiquitous experience no matter what. The other thing that I've been really clued into is just what's happening from a ransomware perspective and that is just not going anywhere. And I think the latest stats are basically showing that when a ransomware occurs, companies on average are only able to receive store 66% of their data. And that's regardless of whether they're restoring it themselves or they're paying for that ransom. So they may pay for that ransom, supposedly get all their data back, but are not able to restore it in a way that's palatable. And so, you know, the latest recommendations are saying backup upon backup upon backup, which means you have a physical backup, you have, you know, your files today and that you have sourced some sort of cloud backup. And really thinking about making the business case for, or getting the help to make the business case for kind of some managed cloud backup becomes extremely important. I also think about some of the application tools, so having things like Microsoft 365 licenses making that whole idea of collaboration so much better. You know, I think some of the things that we've seen this past year, yes, there may be an increase in meetings because we can't just go walk next door, Neil, I can, you know, bother you for 30 minutes and you can't get anything done. We may be over calendared and yet we have more participation in meetings, more diversity in meetings, giving us more diversity in thought. And in some respects, kind of what I've been hearing from not only my own colleagues, but colleagues across the nation or just peers across the nation, is what I'm hearing is that actually business outcomes are improving because there's more diversity in thought as a result of the collaboration that's occurring. So to have something, let's say like Microsoft 365, where it's not only your word and your outlook and all of those sorts of things, but it's teams and it's SharePoint and it's other things that enable people to collaborate in real time can make a huge difference. And it's the type of tools that, you know, as we're looking at, what are they calling it, the great migration of employees, all these people who've left us, we need tools not only to make us better at what it is we do make us faster at what it is that we do. But that will also attract the type of talent that we want and what talent expects today from us.

Amazing tips, great migration and the great resignation together.

That's what it was. That's what I meant to say. Thank you.

One causes the other. You're right. And you got to retain talent and you got to attract talent by working with tools that make it easy for them. You're totally right. And actually the ransomware thing, you're right. We really didn't talk enough about it. Luckily we recently had a conversation with Rapid Scale and Mimecast on a past podcast where they pretty much like you said, you just gotta expect it's happening. So you gotta be prepared for that. And then back up backup. Backup is step one. But then education, like you cannot get away from educating the single point of failure, which is all of us employees opening those emails.

So that's right.

Totally great tips. I really appreciate that. We gotta ask, this is the Tacos in Tech podcast. We gotta know, do you have a favorite taco spot?

So I have to tell you, I probably have like 9,000. Who doesn't love tacos, right?

Who hasn't found a taco they usually don't like. Right? I totally agree. There's.

Yeah. Actually I think I might have had a taco I didn't like like once or twice. But we don't have to talk about those. So I love, I love, love, love, love, love a good Baja style fish taco. Like that is by far my thing and that happens to be by far, I think San Diego's thing. Like I think they were start of that whole thing. So for me, kind of the taco stand in La Jolla is one of my favorites.

Totally. Yeah, you're right. I think we learned to export it too with Rubio's as well. Take the Baja Classic, which they don't.

Do a bad job. They're pretty yummy.

No, I know. They're a great one too. Yeah. Richard Rubio, I think SDSU alum as well. So you cannot go wrong with taco with the taco stand. Except if you're waiting in line, which is often the case for sure.

But if you are waiting in line, you know it's a damn good taco stand. So you know what, it's true.

Another net exporter from San Diego that's in Orange county that if you haven't tried yet, questo worth trying a upscale taco. So I would give that a shot because I know that's where you reside most of the time too.

Oh my gosh. I'm all in.

Or we'll do it. Let's come up and do tacos.

I will take note of that.

Well, Rebecca, this has been great. You really dropped some knowledge for our audience and we very much appreciate that as well as thank you to your team, the commitment you've made to the tech community as well. So very much appreciate the friendship partnership our communities have had and we'll continue doing it. So thank you.

As do we, Neil. Thank you so much.

Cheers. Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. 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 this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at citizenrecording.com you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom and on LinkedIn as well as well as Fresh brewed Tech and Tacos in Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Get the party started. You want decking tacos, tacos in tech. You know we got it.