- Hello and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm your host Aley Hammer
and today we're joined with John Boesen, the CTO at Symbio.
John, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Symbio and your role?
- Yeah, thanks, Aley, it's great to be here.
Look, Symbio is a great Australian success story
which a lot of people don't know about.
So we were founded in 2002
under a business called MyNetFone
and we had a simple mission to transform the way
voice communications would be delivered to households,
small/medium business enterprise, government,
and it was all underpinned by a new technology
called Voice over IP, which now is sort of everywhere
and everyone's heard about that,
but what we were really founded to do
was bridge this Voice over IP world with this Telco world
because the two worlds were very, very different.
Now, the interesting thing was, is a couple of years
after we founded, Skype surfaced and hopefully many of you
have probably used Skype in your time,
but Skype was a classic software-based as a service company
providing Voice over IP connectivity
between computer and computer, but when it first launched,
you couldn't make a phone call from Skype
to a telephone number and that's where we
came in to the fold and we were actually Skype's
seventh customer globally, partner globally,
and what we did is we provided this software approach
to Telco so we sort of look like two companies.
So to a Telco, we look like a Telco.
We build infrastructure
and we build networks and we interconnect
to telecommunication incumbents in countries,
but we also, the other half,
we look like a purebred software company.
So to Skype, that's what we looked like.
We look like a software company
and they were able to use our software APIs that we
had created to hide all the complexity of being a Telco
and that is how they were able to integrate
local number calling capability into their products.
And now, you know, 20 years on,
that's pretty much what Symbio lives and breathes now
is we're powering a lot of technology,
a lot of big players that you would use
in your everyday life.
Actually, even the Zoom call that we're using today,
the phone numbers that are presented in the Zoom calls
are actually on our network.
So we've basically created this bridge
between the software world and the Telco world.
In terms of I guess my role in the organization,
ultimately I'm responsible for driving
our technology strategy that's gonna execute
our company strategy which is now to deploy our technology
across Southeast Asia, but specifically my role
is to make sure our tech stack can scale.
It has the aspirations of having 100% uptime.
You know, there's no point talking about Five 9s anymore.
That's sort of like, okay, well that's standard.
So we aspire to have 100% uptime.
In everything we do, we try and achieve that.
It's very difficult to achieve,
but that's what we try and do.
We try and do it in a frictionless way,
so we really wanna make sure
that where it's transparent as possible to our customers
and the rest of the business, but a big part of my role
is also about building the engineering culture
within the company and really challenging them to grow
and to learn from success and failure,
but ultimately the best part, I guess in my role is just,
you know, working with a lot of talented individuals
that are at different parts of their career development
and just helping guide them and pushing them to do things
that they thought they couldn't do and with an ultimate view
to do things better than yesterday.
So, yeah, that's the sort of overview of Symbio and my role.
- Thank you so much, John.
I mean, your team is so lucky to have you.
Just in the the description there,
it sounds like you love the company.
What you're doing is so incredible.
So I wanted to ask you, John, because Symbio
recently had a major restructure,
so can you walk us through a little bit about what's changed
and what does this actually mean for Symbio's customers?
- Yeah, look, we previously operated as a monolith
so we were effectively a shared services group,
so technology within Symbio
was effectively a shared services group
and with that came a lot of prioritization conversations.
Because we were a shared resource pool,
we had to make sure that everyone got fed, if you like,
that we could deliver what their customers were wanting,
but it did create a lot of friction
and a lot of inefficiency and part of our culture,
which is a learning-based culture,
we wanted to challenge ourselves,
say is there a better way to do this.
So we did some experiments, we tried a few things,
some failed, but a couple of our experiments worked
and what that led us to was to break into three lines
of business that were targeted
to the three customer personas that we saw.
So we saw our different customers
that we were servicing were very different.
Everyone had different requirements
and were coming from different angles,
they had different problems to solve,
so we effectively realigned into what we call UCaaS,
Unified Communications as a Service division,
CPaaS, Communication Platform as a Service,
and one we call TaaS, which is Telco as a Service,
and they sort of map to, the Telco as a Service
maps to small/medium business, and the UCaaS and CPaaS one
sort of map to enterprise and government with a few twists.
So we effectively broke the monolith
into three sort of macro services
or micro services or agile startups
is the best way I like to think about it,
but they operate under the banner of a global group,
cbo.global, and that sort of gives with it
the stability of an established business
and it gives us the flexibility and agility of a startup
so that's translated then into our customers
getting what they need quicker because these lines
of businesses that we created,
we also made sure that they were full stack,
so full stack beyond technology,
so not only in tech circles, you talk about full stack,
you talk about frontend, backend, so on and so forth.
We really full stack these organizations
so that we have sales, operations,
everything that you need to run a business
and that was pretty much the heart and soul,
the transformation we went through about 12 months ago.
- Well, it definitely sounds like you've learned
a lot along the way and, John,
Symbio launched a full suite of services
in Singapore recently and it's expanding all across Asia,
so how has your team been able to launch
a full suite of services in just a couple of weeks actually
when it often takes others several months
or even, quite frankly, several years, how did you do this?
- Yeah, well look, it certainly started from us
being in that situation where it did take us many years
to deploy our technology.
In fact, Australia was our first market that we built
and that literally took five to seven years
to build that network.
We then went into New Zealand
and that took about five years.
And then we went, well, look for us to scale,
we can't keep doing what we're doing, so Singapore for us,
even though it took us three years to get into Singapore,
behind the scenes, we were investing heavily in our people
to upskill them into all things AWS,
which is what we did initially and we started to modernize
all of our processes, build pipelines.
We were adopting CI/CD principles.
We were using Terraform and taking infrastructure
as code methodologies to everything we do.
In actual fact, all our tech stack now
is infrastructure as code so there was a lot of learning
and growth and upskilling that we invested in
and we made a lot of mistakes too along that way,
but that led us to a place where we could now deploy
our ecosystem behind closed doors literally within days
where as previously we would've had to build
all this infrastructure
with this infrastructure-fixed mindset.
So in the three program of work for Singapore,
even though externally it looks like it took us three years
to deploy Singapore, behind the scenes
we had done all this upskilling, all this uplifting
and some other major architectural changes as well
to move away from a monolithic approach,
to move to real time streaming event model,
to abstract all our interfaces
so teams could deploy frequently and often.
So there was a lot of things that we did,
but yeah it was a mix of all those approaches
that has now led us to a great position
for us to now tackle our next market
in a third of the time it took for Singapore.
- John, to round up this interview,
how has your leadership style evolved
since the pandemic began?
Have you learned anything new
that could be of value to other aspiring CTOs
who may be watching this video?
- Well, yeah, look, well, first of all,
I feel as though I'm always learning, right?
I'm always evolving, I guess, as a person, as a leader
and I expect that of all my team and staff as well,
but look, lockdown really forced a different approach.
People used to drop into the office.
That no longer happened.
I could have physical events where I could talk
to the masses and communicate
some pretty important messaging
so I had to switch to Colab platforms
and teams played a fairly important role for us.
I sort of had to brush up on my presentation skills
through a screen, though not always successfully,
to try and connect to people and show emotion
and expression and even in this interview
I'm sort of using my hands here
which I never used to do that much of,
but you try to add these other levels of connectivity
to how you're communicating with people.
We introduced things like real time polling
so we could have that interaction from the audience.
We moved to a large teams' meeting
where everyone would join.
Their mics were all on.
Everyone had to respect each other and turn the mics off
'cause we wanted high degrees of collaboration.
But I think during that whole process for me, you know,
never lose sight of your people and their growth.
That's really important because a lot of what we do
as technologists is here to stay for many years
and a lot of the projects we work on
are multi-year projects so you've gotta grow your people
on that journey so you've really gotta think about that.
Don't be afraid to make big bets,
even though you probably know your team
can't deliver it in the here and now,
you definitely always wanna be real, right,
because you're gonna be held accountable
by your managers or your exec team or your board
so you don't wanna walk the team off a cliff,
but you definitely want to set some aspirational goals
that maybe even challenge you.
But what I can guarantee you is
that those little steps that you take
towards that goal will get you there
and then when you get there, you'll look back and go,
"Oh my God, we've actually done it."
I think it's really important to celebrate those successes
as well when you achieve them.
But I think most important for young leaders
or aspiring CTOs is just remember
you're are always one cog of a bigger wheel.
You're not at the top of the wheel.
You're not the engine by any means.
You're just another cog in that wheel
and it's important for you to understand
the purpose of your cog in the bigger team
and to make sure that it's adding value to the team
and the only way you can achieve that is by asking
lots of questions and saying,
"Hey, am I giving you what you need?
Am I helping you out here?
Is there anything that you need?
Is there something I'm not doing?"
But once you've got that clarity,
it's in a collective, right?
It's then working together as a team.
I have my role to do.
I've got the luxury of having this chat today with you guys
while many of my team are working hard
at doing what they've gotta do.
It's a collaborative team effort,
but that's probably the big takeaway.
Just remember that you are just a cog in the wheel.
- Absolutely, I mean, I think even if you're the CEO,
the MD, it doesn't matter, that that stands true.
So thank you so much, John, for coming in the show today.
The partnership between Symbio and Amazon is amazing.
I cannot wait to continue to watch the journey between us
and if anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much, John.
- Thanks, Aley, thanks very much.