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>> Hey, everyone, welcome to theCUBE,
here live in San Francisco, California,
for AWS Summit 2022.
We're live. We're back with events.
Also, we're having a virtual.
We got hybrid, all kinds of events this year.
Of course, AWS Summit in New York City's happening
this summer, and we'll be there with theCUBE as well.
I'm John Furrier, again, John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
Got a great guest here, Justin Copie,
owner and CEO of Innovative Solutions.
Their booth is right behind us.
Justin, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you. Thank you for having me.
>> So we were just chatting off-camera
about some of the work you're doing.
You're the owner and CEO of Innovative.
>> Yeah. >> So tell us the story.
What do you guys do?
What's the elevator pitch?
>> Yeah, (chuckles) so the elevator pitch
is we are 100% focused on small to midsize businesses
that are moving to the cloud or have
already moved to the cloud, and really trying
to understand how to best control costs,
security, compliance, all the good stuff
that comes along with it, exclusively focused
on AWS and, you know, about 110 people
based in Rochester, New York.
That's where our headquarters is,
but now, we have offices down in Austin, Texas;
up in Toronto, Canada; as well as Chicago
and obviously in New York, and you know,
the business was never like this five years ago.
Founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018
to pivot and go all in on the cloud,
and I've been a part of the company for about 18 years,
bought the company about five years ago,
and it's been a great ride.
>> It's interesting.
The manager services are interesting with cloud
'cause a lot of the heavy lifting is done by AWS.
So we had Matt on your team on earlier,
talking about some of the Edge stuff,
but you guys are a managed cloud service.
You got a cloud advisory, you know, the classic service
as needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations
and application modernization, and obviously,
data is a huge part of it. >> Huge.
>> How is this factoring into what you guys do
and your growth, 'cause you guys are the number one partner
on the SMB side for Edge for AWS?
You got results coming in.
Where's the forcing function?
What's the pressure point?
What's the demand like?
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
Every CEO I talked to that's a small
to mid-side business, they're all trying to understand
how to leverage technology better to help
either drive a revenue target for their own business,
help with customer service 'cause so much
has gone remote now, and we're all having problems
or troubles or issues trying to hire talent,
and you know, tech isn't really at the forefront
and the center of that, so most customers
are coming to us, and they're, like, "Listen,
we got to move to the cloud, or we move some things
to the cloud, and we want to do that better,"
and there's this big misnomer that when you move
to the cloud, you got to automatically modernize,
and what we try to help as many customers understand
as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff
that you maybe currently have on-prem or in a data center
to the cloud first is a first step,
and then progressively working
through a modernization strategy
is always the better approach, and so we spend
a lot of time with small to midsize businesses.
You don't have the technology talent on staff
to be able to do that.
>> Yeah, and they want to get set up,
and the dynamic of, like, latency is huge.
We're seeing that Edge product is a big part of it.
This is not a one-off.
It's happening around everywhere.
>> It is. >> And it's manufacturing.
It's the physical plant or location.
>> Justin: Literally.
>> And you're seeing more IoT devices.
What's that like right now from a challenge
and problem statement standpoint?
Are the customers not staff?
Is the IT staff kind of old school?
Is it new skills?
What's the core problem that you guys solve?
>> In the SMB space, the core issue nine out of 10 times
is people get enamored with the latest and greatest,
and the reality is not everything that's cloud-based,
not all cloud services are the latest and greatest.
Some things have been around for quite some time
and are hardening solutions, and so what we try to do
with technology staff that has traditional on-prem,
let's just say, skillsets, and they're trying to move
to a cloud-based workload, is we try to help those customers
through education and through some practical,
let's just call it use case, whether that's a proof
of concept that we're doing, or whether that's
we're going to migrate a small workload over.
We try to give them the confidence
to be able to not necessarily go it alone,
but to have the gusto and to really have
the opportunity to do that in a wise way,
and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to,
they're, like, "Listen, at the end of the day,
I'm going to be spending money in one place or another.
Whether that's on-prem or in the cloud,
I just want to know that I'm doing that
in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible."
Status quo, I think every business owner knows,
if COVID taught us anything, that status quo is no good.
>> How about factoring in the agility and speed equation?
Does that come up a lot?
>> It does.
I think there's also this idea that if we do
a deep-dive analysis, and we really take a surgical approach
to things, we're going to be better off, and the reality is
the faster you move with anything cloud-based,
the better you are, and so there's this assumption
that we got to get it right the first time.
In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way,
and you realize midway that it's not the right,
let's just say, the right place to go,
it's not like buying a piece of iron that you put
in the clouds, that now, you own it.
In the cloud, you could turn (fingers snapping)
those services on and off, and so it gives you
a much higher density for making decisions
and failing forward.
>> Well, actually shutting down
and abandoning the projects that early
and not worrying about it. >> That's it.
You got it. >> I mean, most people
don't abandon stuff 'cause they're, like, "Oh, I own it."
>> Exactly. >> And they get used to it,
like, and then they wait too long.
>> That's exactly it. >> Frog in boiling water,
as we used to say, so. >> Oh, that's a great analogy.
>> So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting.
I want to get more thoughts on it
because, like, if I'm a CEO of a company,
and, like, okay, I got to make my number.
I got to keep my people motivated, and I got to move faster.
So this is where you guys come in.
I get the whole thing, and by the way, great service.
Professional services in the cloud right now
are so hot because you can build it
and then have optionality.
You got path decisions.
You got new services to take advantage of.
It's almost too much for customers.
It is. >> I mean, everyone I talked to
at re:Invent that's a customer, "Well,
how many announcements did Andy Jassy announce, or Adam?"
You know, the 5,000 announcements
or whatever they do, the huge amounts.
Keeping track of it all is huge.
So what's the mission of your company?
How do you talk to that alignment?
Not just products 'cause I can get that.
Like, values as companies, 'cause they're betting
on you and your people. >> They are. They are.
>> What's the values?
>> Our mission is very simple.
We want to help every small to midsize business
leverage the power of the cloud.
Here's the reality: we believe wholeheartedly.
This is our vision, that every company is going to become
a technology company, so we go to market
with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage
the power of the cloud in some way, shape, or form,
whether they know it or don't know it, and number two,
they're going to become a tech company in the process of that
because everything is so tech-centric,
and so when you talk about speed and agility,
when you talk about the endless options
and the endless permutations of solutions
that a customer can buy in the cloud,
how are you going to ask a team of one or two people
in your IT department to make all of those decisions?
Going it alone or trying to learn it as you go,
it only gets you so far.
Working with a partner, I'll just give you some perspective.
We work with about a thousand small
to midsize business customers.
More than 50% of those customers
are on our managed services, meaning they know
that we have their back, and we're the safety net.
So when a customer is saying, "All right, I'm going to spend
a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud,"
they know that that bill isn't going to jump
to $10,000 a month.
Going it alone, who's there to help protect that?
Number two, if you have a security posture,
and let's just say you're high profile,
and you're going to potentially be more vulnerable
to security attacks.
If you have a partner that's offering you
some managed services, now, again, you've got
that backstop, and you've got those services and tooling.
We offer seven different products that are part
of our managed services that give the customer the tooling
that for them to go out and buy on their own,
for a customer to go out today and go buy
a New Relic solution on their own,
it would cost them a fortune.
>> The training alone would be. >> Insane!
>> A risk factor, never mind the cost.
>> Yes, absolutely. >> The opportunity cost
is huge. >> Huge, absolutely enormous.
Training and development's something, I think,
that is often, you know, it's often overlooked.
Technologists, typically, they want to get their skills up.
They love to get the stickers and the badges and the pins.
At Innovative in 2018, when we made a decision
to go all in on the cloud, I said to the organization,
"You know, we have this idea that we're going to pivot
and be aligned with AWS in such a way
that it's going to really require us all to get certified."
My executive assistant at the time looks at me.
She said, "Even me?"
I said, "Yeah, even you! Why can't you get certified?"
And so we made a conscious decision.
It wasn't a requirement.
It still isn't today, to make sure everybody
in the company has the opportunity to become certified,
even the people that are answering the phones
at the front desk.
And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters.
(John laughing) >> I love it. It's amazing.
I'll tell you what, when that customer calls,
and they have a real Kubernetes issue,
she'll be able to assist and get the right people involved.
>> And that's a cultural factor that you guys have.
So again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs
and businesses in general, small and large.
IT staffs are turning over.
The Gen Z and millennials are in the workforce.
They weren't provisioning top-of-rack switches,
first of all, and so if you're a business,
there's also the, I call, the build-out
return factor, ROI piece.
At what point time as an owner or SMB do I get to ROI?
I got to hire a person to manage it.
That person's going to have five zillion job offers, maybe.
Who knows? I got cybersecurity issues.
Where am I going to find a cyber person?
Data compliance, I need a data scientist
and a compliance person, maybe one and the same.
Good luck trying to find a data scientist
who's also a compliance person, and the list goes on.
I could just continue. >> Absolutely.
>> I need an SRE to manage the SAC report,
and we can pen test. >> Right, right.
>> These are, like- >> Critical issues.
>> This is just, like, these are the table stakes.
>> Yeah, and every business owner's thinking about it.
>> So that's what, at least a million in, loading,
if not three? >> Or more.
>> Just to get that going, and then,
it's like, where's the app? >> Yep.
>> So there's no cloud migration.
There's no modernization on the app side yet.
>> No. No. >> And never mind AI and ML.
>> That's right, that's right, so to try
to go it alone, to me. >> It's hard.
>> It's incredibly difficult, and the other thing is
is there's not a lot of partners,
so the partner- >> No one's raising their hand,
"Boss, I'll do all that," in the IT department.
>> Exactly. >> They're, like,
"Can we just call up, you know, (laughs) our old vendor?"
>> That's right, right, our old vendor.
I like it. (John laughing)
>> But that's so true.
I mean, when I think about how if I were a business owner
starting a business today, and I had to build my team,
and the amount of investment that it would take
to get those people skilled up, and then the risk factor
of those people now having the skills and being
so much more in demand and being recruited away,
that's a real issue, and so how you build your culture
around that is very important,
and it's something that we talk about
with every one of our small to midsize businesses.
>> So just, I want to get your story as CEO.
>> Okay. >> Take us
through your journey.
You said you bought the company, and your progression
to being the owner and CEO of Innovative,
award-winning, you guys doing great, great bet on invest,
good call. >> Yeah.
>> Things are good. Tell your story.
What's your journey?
>> It's real simple.
I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute
of Technology in 2003, and I knew that I was going to school
for IT, and I knew I wanted to be in tech.
I didn't know what I wanted to do,
but I knew I didn't want to code
or configure routers and switches,
so I had this great opportunity with a local IT company
that was doing managed services.
We didn't call it at that time, Innovative Solutions,
to come in and jump on the phone and dial for dollars.
I was going to cold call and introduce other small
to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York,
little western New York, who Innovative was.
Now, we were 19 people at the time, and I came in.
I did an internship for six months, and I loved it.
I learned more in those six months
than I probably did in my first couple of years at RIT.
Long story short, for about seven years, I worked to really
help develop sales process and methodology
for the business so that we could grow and scale,
and we grew to about 30 people, and I went to the owners
at the time in 2010, and I was, like, "Hey, I'm growing
the value of this business, and who knows
where you guys are going to be in another five years?
What do you think about making me an owner?"
And they were, like, "Listen, you got a long ways
before you're going to be an owner, but if you stick it out
and you're patient, we'll work through a succession plan
with you," and I said, "Okay," and there
were four other individuals at the time
that were going to also buy into the business with me.
>> And they were the owners, no outside capital.
>> None, zero.
Well, 2014 comes around, and the other folks
that were going to buy into the business with me
that were also working at Innovative, for different reasons,
they all decided that it wasn't for them.
One started a family.
The other didn't want to put capital in,
didn't want to write a check.
The other had a real big problem
with having to write a check if we couldn't make payroll.
I'm, like, "Well, that's kind of like if we're owners,
we're going to have to, like, cover that stuff."
(John laughing) Look, so-
>> It's called the pucker factor.
>> Exactly, so I sat down with the CEO in early 2015,
and we made the decision that I was going to buy
the three partners out, go through an earn-out process
coupled with an interesting financial strategy
that wouldn't strap the business 'cause they care very much.
The company still had the opportunity to keep going.
So 2016, I bought the business, became the sole owner,
and at that point, we really focused hard
on what do we want this company to be?
We had built this company to this point,
and by 2018, we knew that pivoting,
going all-in on the cloud was important for us,
and we haven't looked back.
>> And at that time, the proof points
were coming clearer and clearer.
2012 through 15 was the early adopters,
the builders, the startups, and early enterprises,
the Capital Ones of the world.
>> Exactly. >> And those kinds
of big enterprises, I don't want to say gamblers,
but ones that were very savvy.
>> The innovators. >> The Thin Tech folks.
>> Yep. >> The hardcore,
glass-eating enterprises. >> Agreed.
Agreed, to find a small to midsize business
to migrate completely to the cloud as infrastructure
was considered, that just didn't happen as often.
What we were seeing were a lot of our small
to midsize business customers,
they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup,
or they wanted to leverage the cloud for disaster recovery
because it lent itself well in early days.
Our most common cloud customer, though,
was the customer that wanted to move messaging
and collaboration, the Microsoft Suite, to the cloud,
and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water,
but by 2017, we knew infrastructure was around the corner,
and so we only had two customers on AWS at the time,
and we made the decision to go all in.
>> Justin, great to have you on theCUBE.
>> Thank you. >> Let's wrap up.
Tell me the hottest product that you have.
Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization?
Is it data? What's the hot product?
And then, put a plug in for the company.
>> Awesome, so there's no question.
Every customers is looking to migrate workloads
and try to figure out how to modernize for the future.
We have very interesting, sophisticated,
yet elegant funding solutions to help customers
with the cash flow constraints that come along
with those migrations, so any SMB that's thinking
about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking
to Innovative Solutions.
We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers
not to be cash-strapped and gives them an opportunity
to move forward in a controlled, contained way
so they can modernize- >> So like insurance,
basically, for them, not insurance in the classic sense,
but you help them out on the cash exposure.
>> Absolutely, we are known for that,
and we're known for being creative
with those customers and being empathetic
to where they are in their journey.
>> And that's, the cloud upside is all about doubling down
on the variable win. >> That's right.
>> Seeing the value and doubling down on it.
>> Absolutely. >> Not praying for it.
>> Yeah, exactly. >> All right, Justin,
thanks for coming on theCUBE.
Really appreciate it.
>> Thank you very much for having me.
>> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here
live in San Francisco, California.
For AWS Summit 2022, I'm John Furrier, your host.
Thanks for watching.
We'll be back with more great coverage
for two days after this short break.
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