ComSpark Podcast - Kevin Westendorf, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President Technology, CenterGrid
comSpark Thought Leader
Kevin Westendorf, CTO, VP Technology
CenterGrid
Moderator
Brandon Hubbard
RDI
Hello and welcome to the ComSpark podcast where you will get to meet today's technology thought leaders. To learn more about us; visit ComSpark.tech
Brandon Hubbard: We're here today with Kevin Westendorf with CenterGrid, a managed cloud provider in the city of Hamilton. My name is Brandon Hubbard. I'm a member of the ComSpark executive host committee and I'm with RDI and I will be your guest moderator today. So, let's get started. Kevin, welcome.
Kevin Westendorf: Thank you.
BH: Is there anything that you want to say before we get into these questions? Any special fact or a hidden little gems that we need to know about you before we start really hearing from you.
KW: Well, hidden gems. The irony of my job at CenterGrid is that it's the same location that I started my IT career in and I won't say how many years ago that was. I started as a coop out of the University of Dayton at Champion International, which is the previous location of where CenterGrid is today.
So, I was there for about three years and four coop terms and then went to Accenture for 16 years and VMware for a couple more and now I've circled back and I'm going to work in the exact same spot where I started that career over many years ago. So, going back to my old digs a was a bit of an adjustment, but it's been seven months now that I've been CTO at CenterGrid and I think I'm now used to it again.
BH: Great. And exactly come full circle. As you mentioned as chief technology officer and VP of technology at CenterGrid. I would like to say that you are going to be a great knowledge expert on the next few questions that we have for you. So, if you don't mind, what is the cloud?
KW: Now, contrary to popular belief, the cloud is not just someone else's computer. I think that kind of does it a disservice. It makes it seem oversimplified and that the capabilities of it are just kind of limited to just running something somewhere else. But basically, what it kind of boils down to is three deployment types, right? Three ways to use that computer storage and network capacity that's somewhere else. Some companies use it in an infrastructure as a service model, which means that basically they just want that capacities because someone else's computer essentially, but they want to not deal with the infrastructure components of it. They're tired of doing firmware updates and technology refreshes and keeping up hardware when their business has really nothing to do with that. So, they're looking for a different way to get the benefits of having us manage all that for them, take care of it all for them so they can get back to if they make widgets, for example, they want to make better widgets, more widgets, faster widgets, they don't want to deal with the infrastructure part.
So that's kind of where infrastructure as a service cloud model comes in and there's lots of benefits to it. Beyond that is kind of giving folks like developers, startups, the ability to have a development platform as a service. So, platform as a service is kind of the other one of the other methods of, of cloud and that's really just a place that is a kind of premade and prebuilt that is providing basically a set of tools and libraries for developers to just come and do their thing. They don't want to have, again, they don't either want to have to worry about the infrastructure and deploying all that. They just know I need to develop codes, so I just need my tools to do that. And you run the rest. So, that's kind of the second model. The third one is the one that I think is probably the most prevalent and most known to people and that software as a service.
So if you use Gmail, if you use any mobile apps, if you use Office 365, those kinds of things, that's all software as a service. That's just, you don't worry about any of it. You can configure maybe the application a little bit inside of it, but you don't care exactly how it runs, how it's configured. You just want to be able to run the APP and have it be there for you. because that's kind of the third model, right? Um, and then kind of the other pieces, different types of clouds, right? We're talking about public, private and hybrid clouds. Public is kind of what you would think people know AWS, they know Azure and Google cloud, those kinds of things. Those are the hyperscale providers, right? That are very public, their services access via portal and you just go in and ask for what you want.
Private clouds are either built in your data center or somebody else's data center, but it's a really dedicated hardware for you and no one else. Hybrid is the idea of combining those things together. Either a public cloud combined with your cloud on premise or a, your cloud, your private cloud in another data center. But it's the linking those things together. I think that's going to be where the future lies because there's going be a multi-cloud world, right? CenterGrid is not under the illusion that we're going to be the cloud provider for everyone in the world. There's things that those other cloud providers do very well, that they build proprietary services that are very good that people like CenterGrid, but we're just not going to hire 50,000 developers and spend billions of dollars and that kind of thing. So, they have their advantages, right.
But we also know that some people are going to want to have things a little closer to home. They're also going to keep some applications in their own data centers just for whatever, for whatever reasons. If it's security or just data privacy at any, anything that has to do with keeping it on site, they're more comfortable with that. So, it's going to be a hybrid world. So, we're going to be connecting multiple clouds. So, the network connections and security between, there's going to be very important. That's kind of the cloud in a nutshell discussion.
BH: Exactly. And I think you'd take us to a great segue. You have said, obviously the market has a lot of cloud products and services out there. So why does CenterGrid do what they do?
KW: I think it's pretty simple. In a nutshell everybody will tell you that what they do as far as the cloud, right? We do this, we're here, we use this type of infrastructure and here's the services that we provide. Here's the kind of how we do it in the tool set, but from our perspective, we're really focused on why we're doing what we're doing. We're building out a new cloud platform right now. It's going to be called CenterGrid Compass and we're rolling it out and the idea is that we're building this because we see a gap in the market. The hyperscale cloud providers, the Google, AWS, Azure, they kind of are great for those startups on one side where you have developers that just want to swipe a credit card, get their capacity, they don't need to talk to anybody. They know what they're doing, they know what they want, so they just go do it. Right. That's perfect for those hyperscale providers.
On the other side, you've got Fortune 500 companies that already have a data center somewhere, have a huge IT staff. They can handle the idea of those hyperscale providers. Some larger providers; they can handle the escalating bills, they can handle governing the infrastructure themselves, so they don't need a lot of help either. But in between those two edges of the spectrum is a large percentage of the population and a lot of organizations fit in there. We feel like the industry analysts will tell you the same thing. They are being told from every direction, get to the cloud, get to the cloud, but they go, where do I start? Who's going to help me? I don't have five guys that have a cloud strategy that they're going to come and bring to me. So where do I even get started? So, we feel like it's CenterGrid that the why we're doing what we're doing is because we really believed that every organization deserves the benefits of the cloud.
Right? So, it's something that we feel like we can add a lot of value to this region by working with these companies that again, they don't want to focus on infrastructure, they want to get back to their business. They want to realize the good things that the cloud can bring to them and that's where we want to help them get there.
BH: Right. And that's a great reason to have the CenterGrid Compass product as, as the guiding light ai the cloud world.
KW: That's why we named it. Exactly.
BH: Well, we've kind of went through that enterprise level of racks and power and data centers. Let's bring that back to your house. What does your home network look like?
KW: Well, I've been through many iterations of home network to handle the 20 plus devices I've got sitting on it between my wife and my two kids and myself; printers, devices, everything all over the place.
But currently it looks like a Google productseum. The multi-cloud world. The Google Wi-Fi package is what I'm using as a Mesh. A Mesh Wi-Fi network that kind of, you can be controlled again from the cloud, right? It keeps feeding data up and you can control it from a mobile app on your phone. It works really well to cover all those spots that are all over the house and gives you control from your phone from anywhere. So, the good thing is I can turn on and off my kids were Wi-Fi access when the homework didn't get done or bad grades this week or just being kids, right? Sometimes they get a little crazy; sometimes too much Xbox time, right. Same thing. So, it's a wonderful package and I think it's perfect for that combination of keeping control within the house and from just outside as well via the cloud control.
BH: Did you start to integrate Google voice since you are using…
KW: Oh my gosh, we'd have brought up. Yes, exactly. I used to be an Apple guy, but now I've switched to Google because I started using a Chromecast and I looked at my iPhone and I went, I'm using all these Google apps and I've got a Google home. I'm like, well, why don't I just go with that platform. Right. So that's where I've recently migrated over. So, I'm a defector.
BH: Exactly. I think that's always going to happen the way the market is to be on one team or another for the rest of our lives. Well, Kevin, I want to thank you for your time on behalf of ComSpark. Is there anything in closing that you would like to share with our general audience here?
KW: I just want to say thanks for the opportunity to talk and I think there's a lot of opportunities for companies to get into the cloud here in the future and I think it'd be great if we could be part of that story for them.
BH: Well, thank you again, Kevin. Again, this is Brandon Hubbard with RDI. To learn more about us, visit comSpark.tech. Goodbye. Until next time.