EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

BOTH: [00:00:00] All right, here we are again. So this is Things Reasons. This is gonna be a very different episode. Thank you very much for tuning back in. You’ll have immediately clocked a couple of things that are different. 

NARAN: I can assure you that’s gonna set the tone of this episode. We’re gonna talk a little bit about IT and how it’s changed over the years. Now, Jono, you and I have been in this game for a long time. I think we’re gonna talk about three distinct eras. We’re gonna talk about, let’s call it circa 20-odd years ago. 

JONO: You defined it as pre-cloud, pre-SaaS? I think so, yeah. Yeah. I, let’s see where that takes us. All right. And there’s a couple of stories there we’ve both got from our, uh, let’s say colourful past. I don’t know whether we could describe ourselves as the last tech people that got away with stuff and had fun. 

BOTH: Is it true? Well, I think actually this, this whole episode is just an excuse to tell some funny stories. That’s right. It’s Tuesday afternoon. Yep. Exactly. Why not? And there’s a glass of wine on the table, and- I did… [00:01:00] That is, that is a departure from our standard. Look, a little bit, but, you know, let’s be relaxed and tell some honest stories about what went on. 

BOTH: I mean, we’re both proud of where we’ve landed, but, you know, there’s some stuff that hap- We, we said we’re transparent. We’re open and transparent. Yeah. Honesty is our policy. It is our policy, and it’s our podcast, and we can do what we like with it. Exactly. So, all right then. 

JONO: [PROMO] All right, a quick one before we continue. Episode nine, The Hyperscalers Are Winning has been getting some really strong feedback since it dropped. It was a rant cast with no guest. It was just Naran and me going deep on how the hyperscalers actually sell, and what buyers need to understand about the position they’re in. A few people told us it changed how they approached their next renewal, and if you haven’t listened, the link is in the [00:02:00] description. 

BOTH: [SECTION: TWENTY YEARS AGO] 

NARAN: [00:02:00] 20 years ago, Jono, you and I, I mean, I looked like a newborn fish back then. I don’t know about you, mate, but, like, 20 years ago, Naran, like, he, he shouldn’t have had a job at all. 

NARAN: I looked like a primary school kid walking around in a, in a terrible shirt. What were you doing 20 years ago? 20 years ago, mate, um, yeah, I was probably in a doctor’s surgery trying to figure out why their server was broken, and they couldn’t write scripts, and the receptionist couldn’t print anything. 

JONO: Yeah. That was… I was a, I was a traveling field tech, uh, for an MSP. Yeah. I was pretty similar as well. I think my first job out of university I was working for a small IT firm. Um, there was me and another guy that was doing sort of traditional IT support type stuff, and I was the field engineer, so I had to go out and meet customers and do things. 

JONO: And I remember back then, they were always grateful to see the IT guy because nobody really knew anything about tech. And when the IT guy rocked [00:03:00] up, there was the working assumption that the IT guy knew how to solve the problem. Yeah. 

BOTH: That, that- No … so you just had to have confidence. Yes. Yeah. You had to have confidence. I also think, um, this was almost, God, like now I sound like two old guys. This was, uh, pre-smartphone with any kind of decent access [00:04:00] to the internet. So if you were gonna try and, um, read an article or figure something out, you sort of had to do that before you left the office. 

JONO: I remember doing that too, in advance, ’cause more often than not, and for a small IT firm, they just assumed that you knew everything about all technology products. Well, yeah. Didn’t you? Well- I did … certainly not, I can assure you. 

BOTH: Oh. But you certainly maintained that you did, and you’d rock up with confidence. ‘I’m, uh, from such and such, and I’m here to solve your problem, please.’ And, uh, you tried your best. How many times did you fix something with a, with a hard reboot [00:04:00] and made it look like it was more clever than what it was? 

BOTH: Yeah, like shaking the dust off. You know what I mean? Giving it a r- The problem was, when you rebooted something that looked like it’d been there for 15 years, you weren’t sure it was gonna come back up again. Nobody knows. It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery, right, and you’re just desperately looking at the lights, you know what I mean? 

BOTH: ‘Cause you knew certain lights were good and certain were bad, and certainly no lights were worse. Some noises were bad. Yeah. Yeah. Grindy, grinding noises. Fans struggling under the weight of the dust that’s on them. Some smells were better than others. Certainly. That’s right. Yeah. So those were the good days. 

NARAN: I remember that in Canberra. I also remember seemingly having time to go and play Counter-Strike during the day as well at a gaming cafe. Remember that? Yeah. Well, Naran, I didn’t have that luxury. Oh. I, I wasn’t… I, d- can you talk us, talk us through that job? Well, look, I mean, I- How do you get one of those jobs? 

NARAN: Uh, it was in the public service. Uh, it’s probably a surprise to you. Um- I’m shocked. Yeah. And I managed to find, let’s just say a, um, a, an anonymous amount of hours during the day to be able to play Counter-Strike [00:05:00] across the road in a gaming cafe, where there were, like, 30 or 40 PCs all networked up. And a certain smell in there as well that was a little bit like- 

NARAN: if anybody’s a fan of South Park, you know, the episode of Cartman and the lads and they’re playing, uh, World of Warcraft. There’s pizza pockets and they’re not moving from the seat for 10… It was like that. It’s a bunch of sweaty IT guys in a poorly ventilated room. High-fiving each other for all sorts of kills and knife attacks and things like that. 

BOTH: That was it Was de_dust your favorite map? I don’t- It was my favorite map. Jesus, you remember the name. Yeah, I re- yeah, yeah. I know that I couldn’t drive afterwards, right? ‘Cause you were so paranoid about bad guys coming out of the bushes and stuff, and you’re strafing around. I had to get my wife to pick me up back then ’cause I couldn’t drive home. 

JONO: Yeah. Oh, man. Well, yeah, that’s, um… So yeah, you were off playing Counter-Strike. I was. I was, uh, I was getting thrown into the deep end in all sorts of crazy situations. Yeah. Yeah, [00:06:00] that whole thing of just, uh, just having to rock up and figure it out. Mm-hmm. Knowledge bases weren’t great. I think it was, uh, y- you had good fundamentals. 

BOTH: Yes … good network engineering, good systems engineering stuff. Maybe you’d done a Microsoft cert, you had a- Yeah, I remember that … you had a Cisco CCNA or something. Yeah, remember the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer thing? Yeah. I was so proud of that. I even had a little badge. Do you remember the little badges that you put on your shirt? 

BOTH: Yeah. You had the badge. I had the badge. I wore it proudly. Yeah. I even read the book. I mean, it was like a textbook about two inches thick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, and, and everything, um, because this was pre-SaaS, you had to go places to fix things mostly, more often than you fixed them remotely. 

NARAN: 100%, yeah. There was no real remote administration per se. Sometimes you were lucky. Yeah, I remember it’s like some of it was dial-up too. Like, I was actually quite proud of this one. I used to do some work for, um, Aboriginal Hostels Limited, and there were, like, 40 different hostels around Australia. Uh, and there were dial-up modems [00:07:00] for each one of these PCs around the country, and it was one of my jobs to update them and do various things, et cetera. 

BOTH: That was dial-up modems, man. You know what I mean? Like, that was old school. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. Yeah, there you go. You know? Mm. Well, I tell you, if you go, um, like, you go… This, uh, this pre-SaaS, everything on-prem, like the job of an IT professional was y- you sort of had to be a, a Swiss Army knife. You did, yeah. 

BOTH: Yeah. And the more lived experience you had, the, the better you were. Correct. That’s right. Um, but I also think i- in a lot of ways, um, uh, there was, I think there was a bit more room to have some fun. I think so too. Because I think- Maybe I’m just nostalgic … I think, well, the expectations were different, weren’t they? 

NARAN: And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk to that as well. We’re sort of reminiscing on the past, and we’ll tell some stories, but I think the, the expectation now on MSPs has changed radically, and I think in the future as well, it’s gonna be, um, even more, uh, [00:08:00] insane if we think about where generative AI is taking us, and if we look at all the things that Palantir are doing. 

JONO: But that’s later, I think, yeah, like talking about how it was. I mean, the IT guy was expected to do a lot, and I know you and I were, were fairly similar in our careers in that we would- Had the confidence and at least the aspiration to jump from job to job, and each time it was like, ‘Can we do this next job? Are we qualified for it?’ Didn’t matter back then. Nobody knows. Nobody knew. You just gotta have a go. 

NARAN: Yeah. You’re the guy that said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ And I’ll learn. Figure it out. That’s right. Yeah. So for me, that landed me in London, and that’s where things got super interesting for me, and all my coolest stories that I love to tell, and I’ll try and tell a couple now very carefully too, I might have- All right. 

JONO: Tell us a cool story. 

BOTH: [SECTION: WAR STORIES] 

NARAN: [00:09:00] I did a bunch of work for News International once upon a time. Um, so significant media organisation, and, uh, I was hired to do a very large transformation project. I was very proud of the fact of winning that as well. 

NARAN: And so this, this organisation was essentially four newspapers, The Sun, uh, The Times, the News of the World, and The Sunday Times. Now, the News of the World no longer exists for a reason. Right? For a very clear reason. One that I was there [00:10:00] when this happened, and I think our audience might remember as well, um, when they got in trouble for phone hacking. Ah. Yeah. 

NARAN: Now, I choose my words carefully here, but this is all public information. Lots of different things happened at that time. There was a lot of money paid out. Um, there was a gentleman called Andy Coulson, who was found guilty of conspiring to hack mobile phones between 2000 and 2006. Uh, and there was a lady called Rebekah Brooks, who was presiding over News at the time, and she was like chief editor or whatever the word is. But she was the lady in charge of all four of those newspapers. 

NARAN: Now, it was a fascinating place to work because the titles, as they were known, they ruled the roost, and your job as an IT guy was to, by God, make sure the newspaper got out. And this was before digital newspapers as well, right? [00:11:00] This was before behind the paywall news content. This was all broadsheet newspapers. So it was, I mean, for me as an IT guy, it was, it was a really cool job, an interesting job at the time. 

NARAN: But this phone hacking situation was wild because we knew that the inquiries were going on at the time, and I mean, I was, I was leading the architecture piece for this transformation, so I had full visibility of everything as a tech guy. Now, stuff happening on with the business is realistically none of my business other than making sure that the papers continue to run and go out. 

NARAN: That was my only obligation. They were like my [00:12:00] primary stakeholder for doing a good job. But beyond that, I mean, I, I had no business interfering at all or being involved with what went on, and certainly not asking any questions around phone hacking. That’s really none of my business. You know what I mean, right? 

NARAN: [** L1 CUT POINT — remove archiving questions paragraph **] 

NARAN: Um, but a really interesting one for me was part of the transformation project was completing a desktop migration, and the desktop migration was almost like the completion of the project from an end user’s perspective. And so when you refresh the laptop or the [00:13:00] desktop or whatever it was that the end user had, that was the completion of their end of it. 

NARAN: And behind the scenes, there was all sorts of back office things that happened. You know, new file servers, new exchange, and all sorts of things that we’d done. But to the end user, it was their desktop refresh, and that’s how they knew that they were all on new systems. And so I get this call up from Rebecca, from her office, right? 

NARAN: And this lady’s, like, she’s running this place, and she’s got the working relationship with Rupert Murdoch. Um, and so she’s, she’s in charge without any shadow of a doubt, and she’s up there in the executive floor. [** P2 CUT POINT — Simpsons/Burns manor analogy ends here **] And I get asked to go and do the desktop migration piece for her. 

NARAN: [00:14:00] Now keep in mind that I did almost no hands-on work back then, right? Like, I had a team of people, of architects, and underneath them there were engineers and people very capable of doing the things that I was being asked to do. And so I never really understood why I got asked to do it, at least at the time. 

NARAN: It made no sense to me. I’m not a hands-on guy at all. I’m just running a team of people and directing stuff and pretending to be important, but other people did all the hard work. And so Naran specifically, as a named resource, had to go up to her office on the executive floor to complete a list of actions that without the instructions in front of me, I can tell you I didn’t know how to do any of it, right? 

NARAN: At all. And I walk in there, and she knew who I was. I’d never been introduced to her. She knew exactly who I was. She knew my name. She says, ‘Hello, Naran. Come in. Can I get you a drink?’ You know, and she’s very polite, very lovely. She had this flock of red hair as well, you know, this very sort of commanding woman, beautifully dressed. 

NARAN: ‘I’m fine. Thanks, Rebecca. You know, I know what I’ve [00:15:00] got to do.’ And I sort of sat down and proceeded to run through this list of actions to upgrade her laptop to this new platform that we’d built. And it was only when I completed the project, or the process I should say, that I knew why I was being asked to do it, why it was me that had to be the one to do it, because launching her profile and launching Outlook and connecting her to her hosted mailbox, which was the thing back then, 

NARAN: [** L2 CUT POINT — remove from ‘I had full visibility’ through ‘she didn’t want anyone else to do it, you know?’ **] 

NARAN: There you go. [00:16:00] 

JONO: You end up in some, um, in some crazy situations. 

NARAN: I’m sure heaps of people listening have their own versions of, of funny stories. Totally. Yeah, and it was, it was just… That for me was one of them, right? And like, there, there were others as well. I mean, I remember, um, a fun one was, remember when we all had to live with PST files? Remember PST files? 

JONO: I remember PST files. Yep. Do you remember managing your mailbox limit or mailbox limit, and you just had to try and keep it under the limit all the time? Oh, and it was a huge deal if somebody was a new starter or they got a, a, a new laptop and you had to move the PST file ’cause the PST file was on the hard drive in the laptop, and [00:17:00] there was no cloud to put it in. 

BOTH: Yep Yeah, and then- It was a thing … then you had to try and make it work with Citrix if people were using a, a virtual desktop. Right. PST files are a nightmare. They were a nightmare, right? And like anytime anybody, and I’m sure many people remember this, we had to do like a file server migration, it was always important to people that their PST files came over. 

BOTH: And it represented like a massive percentage of the overall storage with these things. These archaic storage- It was a huge part of the end user experience. Mm-hmm. As the IT team, if you got that, if you did that ticket well and they didn’t have any problems, or they weren’t losing emails or the metadata for the emails — oh, yeah — couldn’t figure out how old an email was or their archiving system broke. 

BOTH: Bloody PST files, right? And like anyone who’s done a desktop migration might remember this thing called user state migration, right? Which is, God forbid, when you migrate someone’s desktop, that it looks even slightly different to the [00:18:00] way it was before. Down, down to like where the icons were, the desktop picture. Yeah. Stop everything. Everybody panic. Everybody panic. Can’t find the buttons anymore. 

NARAN: I mean, that’s what it was like back then, right? So I thought I’d be clever. So I wrote a little rule, right? I wrote this little rule on my mailbox, and I called it the auto-decrapinator. Okay, here we go. Yeah. I thought I was super clever, and I called it that too, the auto-decrapinator. It was a little rule set up on my mailbox. 

NARAN: And it was very simple. It basically said that anyone external who sent me an email with an attachment got a response from me, automated, that said, ‘Please refrain from sending Naran any attachments. This is my auto-decrapinator,’ and it had all sorts of branding and stuff on it. And it would send that message out, right? 

BOTH: Now, clearly, I wasn’t expecting to get an attachment from anybody important, you know? Was this just so you didn’t have to archive the attachments? That’s right. I did, I got so- And to keep your PST file [00:19:00] clean. Yeah. I got sick of it. I don’t have time to do any of that. I had to go and play Counter-Strike, you might remember. 

NARAN: Yeah, so it backfired on me because, um, like, friends of mine would try and send me invitations to like a party or something like that, right? And, um, I’d get angry because, like, some of my mates were going to a party, and I wasn’t. I’m like, ‘Why didn’t I get an invitation to this?’ And I was incredulous about it. 

BOTH: They got decrapinated. They got decrapinated. And I, I caught up with one of the blokes and, um, said, ‘Thanks for the invite.’ He goes, ‘Naran, have you got a minute?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s like, ‘I got your auto-decrapinator message. I was pretty annoyed by it, to be honest with you. So you weren’t invited.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.’ Yeah. That’s an own goal. 

BOTH: Yeah, terrible. Kicked an own goal. Kicked an own goal. And, um, look, I kept the service running ’cause I was still happy to have the PST files better managed. Well, I’ll tell you what, I reckon a lot of MSPs, um, made a lot of [00:20:00] money out of managing mail. Yeah. ‘Cause it was just hard. It was unwieldy. It was. Took up a lot of internal IT resources. 

JONO: You know, the PST files are one thing but, um, I wish we could go to the audience and say, ‘Put your hand up. Put your hands up if, if you’re ever an Exchange admin.’ How many people, um, how many unexplained mail outages have happened in organisations because, uh, a mail server ran out of disk space? 

BOTH: Absolutely. Yeah. What do you reckon that stat is? Uh, it would be significant, right? And it was, how- Capacity management. And how big a deal was an email outage back then, too? Do you remember? Oh, it was a disaster. Disaster. 

NARAN: One of my worst experiences, actually, and this was also working for, for News International. I’ll tell this story. It was sort of towards the tail end of that big transformation project, and, um, [00:21:00] I mean, I’ll, I’ll wear this one. This happened on my watch. 

NARAN: Um, we had, you know that classic, you should never mix test and production or dev and production environments together, right? So yes … you remember how bad that could be? Never have I ever. Never have I ever. Right. And so we knew of this, right? And we had different environments set up with firewalls, and the idea would be that you would build essentially as close to representative of a production environment in a test dev or whatever it is as possible, right? 

NARAN: Within the resources that you had, which included active directory and exchange servers and things of that nature. And the AD instance was basically a replica of production, ’cause it needed to be in order for all the downstream applications to work and authenticate. Feel like I know where this is going. You know where this is going, don’t you? Right? 

NARAN: And so unbeknownst to me, two of my guys were together and working away on something, and they managed to connect test and production, and it, such that there was, uh, AD replication [00:22:00] that went on, right? And the result of that was that the schema was updated such that exchange email went down, right? 

NARAN: And y- you get that, you… Have you had that sinking feeling that something’s happened and you’re accountable for it, and I was, and it was my guys, my team, that you know the shit’s about to hit the fan badly, right? Like, really badly, and you, you just get that feeling of dread. I’m sure we’ve all had it, everyone. 

JONO: Everybody must have had that feeling where you’ve done something, you know, oh, this is not easily fixed. You must have had something like that. Oh, mate, I got a, a, the, the parties involved will need to remain nameless. Okay. But speaking about mixing production with something else. I’ll continue this story. You carry on, though. Go for it. 

JONO: Well, you, you asked the question, so it’s- I did … um, the, the craziest one I, w- you know, it’s like those Murphy’s Law ones. Yeah. Just change control things. Yeah. [00:23:00] Uh, we were running a disaster recovery test. Mm. And this was an annual test, and this disaster recovery environment was a replica of the production environment. 

JONO: Yes. And, um, you know, every day, multiple times a day, depend- it was dependent on the recovery point objective. Yep. So how many times a day do you replicate production into DR? Yep. So is that it’s always ready with an exact copy of what happens in production, maybe a little bit older if you ever need to recover to it. And the RPO is how long does it take you to get back to that point, whatever it is. 

JONO: Um, now, when you do a DR test, you’re supposed to stand up the recovery environment, but isolate it so that it can’t talk to the outside world, or it can’t communicate with anything in production. Well, that seems like a good idea. It’s called a test bubble. Certainly. The way that you would do a test bubble in this instance [00:24:00] — there are better ways of doing this now — but back then you would just do it by isolating the network. 

JONO: Um, problem was a network engineer forgot to do the change properly, let’s just say that. All right. Somehow the change didn’t get done properly to isolate that network. Mm. And there were some servers in that environment that were running a batch job, basically an automated job, to, uh, pull down information from the production environment and communicate with customers. Okay. 

JONO: Automatically. Mm. And, uh, so this environment was up and running and communicating with the outside world [00:25:00] in parallel to the production environment, uh, for things like picking slips and connotes and these kinds of things. Connotes, good times. And, um, and it wasn’t for, it’s about a, like a, I don’t know, four or five days. 

JONO: Four or five days into the test, started getting some funny phone calls. That’s a long test, can I tell you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they had a lot of things, many tests needed to happen. Yes. It was taking a long time. But we were getting calls, uh, from say, like this bit of information’s missing, or this, we can’t figure out why this database isn’t up to date, or this customer’s record’s not right. 

JONO: Mm. And then I remember that feeling where the penny dropped. Yeah. The penny dropped and we realised that, um, both systems were talking to each other and the outside world at the same time when they shouldn’t have been. Good times. And so you’re basically getting half of the customer’s information landing in production and half in the DR environment. 

JONO: That’s it. And after four days, no one knows what’s up or down. No. That’s right. And then just that comment of, um- That, oh, this is, this is not gonna be easy to fix. I know, right. And so that, that was it for me. I had this sinking feeling, oh, this is bad. [00:26:00] 

NARAN: And then I collared the two guys that had been working that who I’d assumed had caused this problem, and I asked a couple of questions and they made it worse with their expression on their face, right? They’re just, this blood went out of their face. I went, ‘Oh, no.’ 

NARAN: So, like, email was down, um, and it was down for days. I think it was, like, I wanna say two or three days. My LinkedIn mates will keep me honest here. You know who you are, right? It felt like a couple of days at least. And, uh, Rebecca Brooks was there. She came down with, like, some of her, uh, underlings as well, and made it clear that this was a serious problem and you need to get on it, and they were very upset and annoyed. 

NARAN: And I just knew that, like, the priority was to fix the problem first, but afterwards that there would be a reckoning for what had happened. So this was all going on. There were, like, hourly catch-ups with leadership around how we’re progressing, how it’s going, how it’s being addressed. I was in pretty much every one of those sessions as well. I think everyone gets very sad when things go down . Oh, man. But, [00:27:00] 

NARAN: God forbid, you could live without email for a couple of days. You know what I mean? Like, if email went down today on M365, no one cares. You go to, go to a cafe and have lunch or something. Like, it doesn’t matter. Does it? Yeah. Oh, I don’t know. Do you still read your emails? Look, people probably send me email. They’re getting decrepinated. Getting decrepinated. 

NARAN: But it’s like, it was a huge problem, and, um, it eventually being an, an authority restore of Active Directory, right? Which was like, you know, break glass IT things. That was, like, the worst thing, right? And there was an outsourcer involved at the time that had to help us with that, which added to the complications as well, right? And so things got worse before they got better. 

NARAN: Things are gonna get worse before they get better. Yeah, your beard’s stuck in the petrol spout. Ugh, ugh. Yeah, yeah. And so, uh, look, eventually it was recovered, right? And emails started to flow again, and when I went to [00:28:00] bed after that, like, ’cause I hadn’t slept in over two days. 

NARAN: You know that scene in Trainspotting where he lays back in the carpet and sinks into the floor? Like, when I laid back in bed, like, I don’t think I woke up for 15 hours. You know what I mean? Like, it was just- Oh, mate… but every one of these grey hairs, and I thank you all not to notice, came from that, I’m pretty sure. 

BOTH: [SECTION: THEN SAAS HAPPENED] 

JONO: call them confessions stories. Pretty much. Like, we’ve all got ’em. Um, maybe it’s a story for another day, but I, I could, I could tell you how I found out the hard way that argon gas and moving parts in hard drives on storage area networks don’t mix. 

NARAN: No. Did you get stuck in the gas? No, no, no. No, no. Where when, if that, if that fire suppression gas goes off, um, they don’t do it this way anymore. No. But if, uh, if it does, um, yeah, uh, spinning disks really don’t like it. No, right. What happens to [00:29:00] you if you breathe that stuff in? That’s not good. Well, I wasn’t in there at the time. Mm. Yeah. 

BOTH: But, uh, but I think, uh, where are we going with all this? Well, um, I think things are getting better. Things are getting better. Th- things are better now. They are better. It’s easier to be a professional. Do you think it’s better? I mean, expectations are changing, too. 

NARAN: Like, I think some of these fundamentals that we’re talking about have changed markedly, right? Like, we’re all living with M365. I mean, who, who would’ve guessed that Microsoft would get that so right? I don’t know a single business that doesn’t use that, by the way, except for Amazon employees. God bless them. Or, or Google. Love you all, AWS employees, fans of the podcast. But, like, everybody else is using M365. 

JONO: Right, and it works, and we don’t worry about PST files anymore. Well, I think it’s SaaS in general. So we said we said pre-SaaS and then- Now we’re in the SaaS era. What happened when, when software companies got good at SaaS and cloud, [00:30:00] um, I think, I think some of these problems became someone else’s problems. 

BOTH: They did. But also because they’re then delivering that same pattern to thousands of customers at scale, the ability to manage and operate those systems at scale, uh, got better out of necessity. And there’s still lots of problems. But a lot of these kinds of problems where these pre-SaaS problems aren’t a thing anymore. No, they’re not. 

JONO: Do you think… Now, clearly, I mean, technology’s moved on a lot, but the fact that all of those problems went away, I mean, what’s the IT guy gonna do now is clearly there’s an- You’re an MSP. What do you even do anymore? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s like- Doesn’t it just work? Exactly. 

NARAN: Right. Wow. And so today, the modern MSP is expected to be this sort of merging of a, an orchestration systems integrator-type person, that it’s not enough just to be reactive. You’ve [00:31:00] gotta demonstrate that you are proactive, and that you’ve got various features and capabilities that deliver on return on investment, and all these good things. 

JONO: It’s not enough just to keep an Exchange server running and to politely rock up when something breaks, when you’re good and ready to fix a ticket. Those days are long gone. No, I, I think that’s right. Um, IT professionals have had to move further up the value chain. That’s right. Definitely. Yes. Because I think scale has, uh, has sort of commoditised a lot of foundational skills. 

BOTH: Yep. Um, software to find things. Software to find infrastructure. Software to find networking. Yep. Um- We- … you still need to understand the fundamentals of networking, but it’s probably not so important to be able to subnet using a pen and [00:32:00] paper anymore. 

BOTH: No … anymore. Which, let’s face it, those were skills that were forged in fire because we were playing networked games in our houses like Duke Nukem and Doom 2 and all the rest of it, and you were forced to understand what a subnet was and TCIP and, and all the rest of it. 

BOTH: Yeah, pro- I, I think so. So the, so it’s gotten, um… Yeah, IT, uh, for the IT profession, the modern IT professional now, I think has had to really level up, um, in, in a lot of ways and to demonstrate value back into a business or, or an end user. 

JONO: Yeah, and look, if I look at our, our cyber business, um, we call that high-value tasks, right? So I mean, our MSP is a, we, we are a business that scales with technology. So I would say every year, it’s not even every year, it’s every quarter, we’re adding new programmatic capability, [00:33:00] ’cause any opportunity that we have to do something with tech, we embrace it. 

JONO: For the simple reason that we want our people, of which we retain all of them, case in point to anybody that’s gotten rid of people because of AI, we love all of you, but that’s not the right way to do things. So I think you keep your people, and you have them doing high-value tasks because it should be more interesting that way. 

BOTH: Yeah, I, I think that- Right? I, I think that’s right. Like in, in a, in a SaaS era, there’s still… Like, if we’re honest, there’s still a few problems you can fix with a, with a good old-fashioned hard reset. 100%. With a little cheeky reboot. Why not? Well, you’ve got to at least rule it out. Well, then you can check the logs later and figure out, um, what really went wrong. 

BOTH: Exactly right. So you, you still can, but I think, uh, I think now with cloud and SaaS and things operating in a standard way at scale, yeah, uh, businesses have a lot more choice. They’ve got an easier time now of, of eking value [00:34:00] out of IT. 

BOTH: [SECTION: THE JOB TODAY] 

BOTH: Yeah. You don’t have to put as many Lego bricks together and figure out how to make it work. I wonder, I mean, it’s all relative, right? But, like, do we think it’s harder now, or do we just think it’s different? 

JONO: Yeah, I… It’s a good question. I, I sort of, I’ve been thinking about that a bit. Hmm. Obviously, I’m in the MSP space. Hmm. Um, with ASE and, and we do some stuff, some high-stakes versions of this in, in the critical infrastructure space as well. Yeah. Uh, I think, I think it’s different. Yeah. I think it’s still hard. But I think it’s different. Yeah. And the stakes are definitely higher. 

JONO: They are. For example, I think, you and I were laughing about, um, like 20 years ago I was probably rocking up to a, a doctor’s surgery trying to figure out why medical director was down and they couldn’t print, or they couldn’t restore something from a backup tape, probably ’cause the backup [00:35:00] jobs hadn’t been running. 

BOTH: Right. Somebody should’ve been checking that, imagine. No, I feel like it was the tape that was broken. Okay. Yeah. Someone probably should’ve- Tapes break all the time. All the time. All the time. Um, so back then it was security was, was re- Like it, it was not, not uncommon for most medium-sized businesses to probably not have even purchased a, a firewall. 

BOTH: Well, you just had antivirus software, didn’t you? You… It was probably good enough to have antivirus software and configure your router properly so that, um- It was a NAT device only. So that you were letting the right traffic in and out. That’s it. That was enough. The, that was enough. 

NARAN: And now, y- and this is where I get to it’s, it’s still hard, but different. It is. Now everybody’s a target. Your AI-powered attack vectors. Mm-hmm. The threat landscape’s changing every day. Yep. The, what it costs to comply is increasing [00:36:00] all the time. Mm. Just the, just in the cyber space alone, it’s a million times harder than it was. 

JONO: It is. It really is. And yet, I mean, if I look at the people that I work with, I mean, at, at, at Macquarie it’s all about cost and risk, right? For us, it’s like you gotta be able to demonstrate that you can take cost out relative to your value and what you do and forward projects and all the rest of it, and it’s the accountability of being able to reduce risk in any capacity. 

JONO: And there’s a much more advanced stack. But if I look at, I mean, if I look at the people that we work with, I mean, they’re very happy doing their jobs. I think the tools and technology’s all very capable. And yes, the, the, the problems have changed, but I think the job itself is maybe more enjoyable and more interesting. Or is it just how I feel about it currently? 

BOTH: Uh, it, it could… Maybe it’s all [00:37:00] relative. Maybe. I don’t know. Like, it’s hard, you got nostalgia for, um, all sorts of different times in your career. Why do I only remember the stories? Yeah, that’s the funny stories. You know what I mean? Like, the last five years I remember more of the outcomes and the clever things, and like back then I just remember the stories and the funny things. 

JONO: Maybe that’s ’cause I was younger and stupid. I, I always appreciated, uh, being on the tools, working in an IT department, dealing with a crisis. Yeah. Like, loved trying to figure out why something was broken. Mm. And, uh, and it was- I think in a lot of ways it was harder to figure it out. Mm. There was less access to knowledge bases and good documentation, even logs. Yeah. Like, everything has a log now. 

BOTH: Yeah. St- you couldn’t, like, you couldn’t figure out which network engineer made the bad change on that DR project. No. There were no logs. Well, not, not if the person who was raising the change was a Simpsons character. You know what I mean? Because people didn’t put their real name in the system. No. Exactly. Ralph Wiggum’s done something again. Yeah. Yeah. Bless him. 

NARAN: So ca- I don’t know, can the modern IT [00:38:00] professional ever really get away with anything? I don’t think so. I tell you what’s alarming to me, and this, this is unknown to many people as well, and just keep an eye out on this, businesses running M365, but someone in your organisation has access to an admin console that can see your productivity, right? They have endless stats on the things that you do, the things that you access, how frequently you do them. 

NARAN: You know, if you’re flaking off for three or four hours doing nothing and you’re, you know, you’re almost dormant, people know, right? That’s visible. All those stats are captured. Somebody knows in your organisation. I’m just telling you right now. Even if they care to look, yeah. 

BOTH: Yeah, if they care to look, mate. Well, there, I think there’s, there’s a lot more data around, where, uh, data, data is the thing that is now driving everything. So when you say is it harder or is it different- Doesn’t feel like it. No, I, I think, I think a modern IT professional’s dealing with, with a very complicated cyber situation, [00:39:00] uh, trying to manage data. 

BOTH: Yeah. Figure out who’s got access to it, how that happens at scale. Yeah. Keep it safe. Yeah. Make sure they’re not paying too much for it. We haven’t even got into cost yet, but I think- Yeah. So is it harder? In some ways it’s easier. Mm. In a lot of ways it, it’s, it’s way more difficult. Right. You have to really level up to be good at this. 

NARAN: Remember, it wasn’t only that long ago, right? Like, I mean, you know, we’re all paying these M365 subscriptions. At one point it was 30, 40 bucks per user per month, then everybody was convinced to buy E5 because security reasons, risk, cyber things, you know what I mean? So we’re paying, like, 50, 60 bucks a month per user across could be hundreds if not thousands of users in your organisation. 

NARAN: And now, with our models, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I reckon my burden to the organisation with my subscriptions, I’m probably pushing 3, 400 bucks a month for the various things I’ve got going on, right? And you got your Claude Premium licence and other things. I [00:40:00] mean, extra tokens when you’re doing big jobs. I mean, it’s, it’s expensive now. 

NARAN: I feel like I’m doing good work, right? I’ve never felt more productive. I’m doing loads of things, but the cost for me and others like me is now 3 or 4x than it was, uh, less than two years ago, and we all thought that was expensive, and we’re all blaming Microsoft. 

JONO: Yeah, well, that’s where, uh, IT professionals now have to be a lot, I think, a lot more commercially astute. Right. Pre-SaaS, what did you do? Everything was a fixed cost. Right. You bought some assets. The CFO dealt with that. Mm. Depreciated it over five years. You paid the maintenance contract to the software vendor. You did. You employed some people. Mm. Um, you paid your utilities bill for your network, and there was, there wasn’t much else going on. No. Very different now. Very different now. 

BOTH: [SECTION CONTINUES: AI and where it’s going] 

NARAN: And in terms of where it’s going, I mean, I, I have to look at the Palantir example, right? Because, [00:41:00] you know, if we’re, if we’re to believe that, um, agents are gonna do work for all of us, I mean, they’re doing work for me. I mean, we had, you know, Jason Serda in here talking about his mate Claude, right, on the previous episode. Oh, yeah. Well, bless him, right? 

NARAN: Like, Claude’s doing everything. It’s, like, responding to emails. It’s evaluating, um, business propositions against his mandate. It’s producing little podcasts for him, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I’m getting there, you know what I mean? I’m, I’m trying to come up with new ways to embrace it more frankly, ’cause it’s interesting and fun, and I enjoy it, right? 

NARAN: But in terms of where that goes, and we’ve talked previously about this concept of the ontology, which is like this living, breathing, uh, set of business rules and context being mapped from a million different data sources, right? And modal context protocol, capturing and preserving that context as AI models can do all sorts of things for you. 

NARAN: And in part it might be coming up with a million different ideas for agents and automation and capabilities. I feel like we’re on that path, [00:42:00] right? I feel like a few years from now, all organisations are gonna be a handful of people, hopefully all the people that have jobs today, with a bunch of agents doing three or four X the things that they used to do. 

BOTH: Yeah. It, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes. So we talked about pre-SaaS, post-SaaS, which is really, you know, it’s code for post- The world of opportunity … scaling, scaling of everything, buying things as a service. Yep. FinOps being a thing. Yep. Subscription services. All of that. 

BOTH: It’s, uh, I think the IT professional’s job has changed a lot. Mm. It’s a very dynamic career. Yeah. Where it’s going, uh, with AI, yeah, n- I, I, who knows? Who knows. Like, uh, who, who could have predicted where… I think, uh, 20 years ago it would’ve been difficult for us to predict what the job of a CIS admin would look like with the advent of hyperscale cloud. That’s right. It’s probably just as hard now. 

BOTH: That’s right. One thing’s for certain, I think there’s almost no separation now with business [00:43:00] outcome, right? I mean, you just look at, like, tenders that MSPs go for these days. You, you’re almost required to deliver return on investment every time, right? And so you just are so much closer now to the business outcome and business objectives because the technology pushes you closer to that. 

BOTH: And there’s an expectation that you at least understand that and can deliver capabilities where you’re probably accountable for the outcome as well, ’cause it’s not IT for IT’s sake anymore. I mean, those days are long gone. You know? Yeah, that’s right You, you know, trusting the IT guy ’cause nobody knows what he’s doing. That’s over, right? 

BOTH: [SECTION: CONFESSIONS] 

BOTH: Well, you c- I don’t think even as a, just in general, as a professional in certain industries, um, say you’re an accountant, it’s no good to be ignorant of IT. No. So everybody’s gotta be very technically literate now. That’s right. Well, do you know what? That that’s changed. I feel like the job’s more interesting because of it, right? Yeah. And nobody seems to be complaining. No. 

BOTH: I think, I think it’s gonna be wild [00:44:00] where it’s going. Mm-hmm. You know, um, we had an idea we’re gonna put to our listeners today. Yeah, that’s it. All right. we’re nothing if not generous here at Things Reasons, and we know that the IT industry needs to get a few things off their chest. 

BOTH: Sure do. That’s right. We’re talking to you, the professionals out there with confessions. Yep. Confessions from the IT professional. That’s right. Professional confessions from professionals. We are going to give you an anonymous place for you to give us your funniest stories. Yep. 

BOTH: Outages, things that broke that you pretended you fixed but you didn’t, tickets that got closed when they weren’t really closed, and you just really needed to go home. We wanna hear about it all. The industry needs to understand this stuff, ’cause God bless everybody, if we don’t talk about it, we won’t get past it. It’s important. 

BOTH: We think it’s important. We know you do, too. We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and we’re gonna read the best ones on the episode. That’s right. We pr- Watch out … provide a link right here [00:45:00]. All right? All right. Done. 

BOTH: Thank you very much for listening in. Uh, this was more relaxed and chilled. I hope you enjoyed it. Uh, now, in terms of where you find us, it’s anywhere you get your podcasts. That’s on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast, you name it. Look for Things.Reasons. We are of course produced by Pru Loon, uh, and Karina Aguilera as well as our digital producer. That’s a wrap. That’s a wrap. Thanks, everyone. See you next time.