Amir Bormand: [00:00:00] On this episode of the podcast I have with me Eric LaBree. He is the former VP Global Cloud Ops, and currently a cloud service consultant. We’re gonna be talking about delivering cloud transformation and efficiency. Gonna be talking around. Some of the efficiency aspects of it, some of the offloading at CapEx to opex building a 24 7 org.
Try to cover as much as we can with Eric. He’s got a fantastic background. Eric, thank you for joining us on the show.
Eric Labourdette: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. All right. Before we start obviously just wanna kind of get to know what some of your responsibilities have been in the past and we’ll dive in.
Eric Labourdette: Yeah, so I’ve been you leading your r and d transformation for, for some time now from your agile to DevOps to SRE and, and lately more focused on the cloud operation. So making sure that we have a organization to drive the business and make it profitable in way. [00:01:00] Awesome, awesome.
Amir Bormand: All right, so this topic.
It’s, it’s I think it’s gonna be interesting when delivering cloud transformation efficiency various, you know, areas that we’re gonna touch on. We’ll see how far we get. I guess when you’re kind of thinking about, you know, driving an efficient cloud organization, right? Let’s say that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a goal for a lot of companies.
What does that exactly mean to you? I know it means different things for different people, but based on your experience, what, what are you hoping to gain Efficiency.
Eric Labourdette: So yeah, this business’ a big drive around, you know, going to the cloud. But it’s all about you, customer service and need to be adapted for, for the mindset, I would say.
And you need to focus on operational margin in a way to have a nice, you know, efficient organization. It’s key for you because it’s not that easy. We need to make a differentiation on the cloud services about services that are multi-tenant and the one that are more private size.[00:02:00] Usually large organization, bank financial are more focused around private size, so that means they want to have dedicated environment just for them.
They don’t want to share that data with anyone. So you, the multi toon solution, I’m not always adapted for them. So, driving a, a cloud business around private SaaS is a challenge because you have to face, you know, the scalability of it. You know, each customer has their own dedicated of your own, and you want to make sure that it works fine, but also obviously the scaling is difficult.
So it’s all about your getting that your walking correct. And making you getting value to our customer in a way. So you’re shifting from a software company delivering software on premise to the cloud it’s a different approach and it’s different kinda work. You, you’re gonna apply to your operation side.
Absolutely.
Amir Bormand: I, I guess when you’re kind of looking at that and, and you’re trying to, you know, bring more value to the customer [00:03:00] obviously, you know, operational margin, we’ll talk. You know, the, the, the financial side and the second, but how are you measuring, like what, what are the typical measures if I’m, if I’m hoping to achieve better customer service?
Obviously, I hope there’s a baseline metric, but what are some metrics that, that a company could use to actually measure the, the gain from the shift to a, a cloud strategy?
Eric Labourdette: The best indicator that we found is the NPSs the net promoter score. I dunno if you’re familiar with that. So we work with companies, Qualtrics to collect data.
So we send survey directly to our customer. And they provide a, a rating on our service. A and we learn a lot about that because you can identify any kind of kpi P or or measurement internally. But the best new measurement you can get is from the customer itself, right? So, collecting those surveys, those feedback is, is a gold mine for us to improve.
And, and improve the rating in the last, you know, four years. I improved that case by 30 [00:04:00] points by just you digging into those feedback and, and try to apply efficiency behind that.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. And I guess when you’re talking, when we’re talking about, you know, cloud transformation, I mean, Everything’s in the cloud.
It could, it could touch a multitude of things. It could be as basic as a customer service portal. It could be, you know, the whole platform needs to move into, you know, some kind of a cloud infrastructure when you’re trying to identify. You know, and every company has different stages, but when you’re looking at the customer side, you’re trying to serve the customer, how do you prioritize?
Because obviously every department has a, has a need. It’s, it’s coming to your lab, different initiatives, different projects. You have to pick and choose. How do you go about deciding, like obviously I’m sure there’s a steering committee, but. But the prioritization has to happen. Yeah. I,
Eric Labourdette: I think from it’s all about, you know, where you get the most value out of it.
You know, a cloud is a key, but you know, it’s all about, you know, what, you get beyond that. It’s about, you know, offloading your [00:05:00] CapEx to opex. So it, it kind of useful from a financial standpoint. It’s about, you know, reducing resource management. When you run a, a software in-house that requires a very specific skillset set.
As you know, these days, you get the great resignation is difficult to find the right skillset in your enterprise. So by moving cloud, you kind of offload all the resource management aspect of it, trying to identify, hire the right person and so on. It’s about outsourcing the expertise. You know, you, you’re focusing on your bank.
You wanna focus on, on the banking, your industry. You don’t wanna focus on it. You don’t wanna focus software. So you outsource all the expertise in the company that is dedicated to to help you out. It’s about, you know, the reliability, right? You know, you offload. Per that run, new cloud services 24 by seven.
And, and their main goal is to provide this [00:06:00] reliability, this sla near the 3 9 4 nines. And they guarantees that in a way, because of the expertise about their new distribution, about the architecture they can implement on the SaaS. So there’s a lot of reason why you want to go to the cloud. And last but not least, it’s about security and data protection.
Obviously these days everybody’s focused about that you want to make sure it’s focused, it’s secure, and, and you, you save your, your, your data, right? Sharing that the world. So, and these days actually cloud company. I, I have a, a very efficient way of, you know, making sure your data are secure and, and, and so on.
So, that’s kind of, you know, the, the key things that you make a selection about what project you, you want to move to the cloud first. Obviously each company is different and, and have different focus, but based on the value you can get for your customer, you can pick and choose which one is more adapted for that.[00:07:00]
And, and last thing is about also, What kind of process you are running, you know, something that is more standard is more you adapted to go to the cloud. That’s something that is very customized. Customization doesn’t feed very well with the cloud
Amir Bormand: usually. Yeah. No, and, and, and I guess that that’s, that’s some of the complexity as you have systems.
The companies have used for years and un unraveling that to make it, you know, something that could fit the clock could be very difficult. I, I guess, you know, you mentioned you know, some of the cost savings of the benefits. Do you have an example of, of a time that you saw, you know, some, some significant software like efficiency or cost reduction?
Eric Labourdette: So, so how do you achieve this new efficiency? So it’s all about your cost control and, and optimization. First need to look at your vendor, right? Making sure that you negotiate the, the right contract, the right savings, the right discount and also try to consolidate. You know, what I’ve seen when I took over the cloud was, you know, a lot of different [00:08:00] vendor providing the same services.
For different, you know, features and elements. So trying to do some economy of scale by, you know, consolidating the same vendor. Two is about, you know, the, the provider you’re using, your aws, Azure, Google, and so on. I mean, those providers are great in providing your infrastructure, the service, but it’s very easy to use and very easy to spend money with them.
So you know, the thing is really. Looking about your spending on, on the search new platform and, and, and monitor that you have dedicated people looking at the spending. How can you optimize your run time using in your selling plan in AWS or, or reserve instance? All those elements that you can.
It’s also about using new tools such as new cloud health, for example, that’s gonna monitor and track everything across your different LS account. And after it’s to work with the operation team and r and d, try to [00:09:00] optimize new all services or easy to instance, to make sure they’re not oversized they are near the right, right, element and so on.
So, third one is about your architecture itself. You need to optimize your architecture on the cloud to make sure that you get the most out of it. If you develop new, new service, you know, that is gonna be multi, you know, with content, air and continuous deployment, that’s, that’s one thing. But a lot of new situation is on private SA is you, you get a monolithic new implementation.
And you need to make it in your cloud ready in a way. So you’ve got a lot of architecture optimization and working closely with r and d to make it work. It can be about, you know, the load balancer instead of using a load balancer, I guess external one, using the one from aws like l b and Sowan, that will be cheaper to run.
So a lot of things that can be done, or just looking at the overall architecture of your product. In term [00:10:00] of, you know, how many database you run, can you consolidate that and, and make it, you know, cheaper in term of run time, as well as number of license that you’re gonna have to buy to the vendor. And so that’s kind of thing you need to look at to make sure you can have a, a, an efficient run time and, and economy of scale.
Like I said, but the vendor. You need to make sure you, you, you focus on standardization. You know, every customization you have on the cloud is gonna cost you a lot of money. You need to standardize as much as you can, and the processes are here to help you out in your et. Obviously it’s, it’s a great way to, Optimize your standardization, your, your processes.
But you know, it needs to be customer driven. It needs to make sense. You need to get the feedback from the NPSs I was talking about previously to make sure that your process is not overwhelming and provide a lot of overhead. It needs to be efficient and link to your different tooling you might have.
[00:11:00] So a lot of things can be done and help you out on the process side. From an implementation standpoint, but you need to have your hands on and understanding how you can tweak and optimize those processes.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. And, and I guess as you’re kind of talking about processes and we’re talking about customer service and you know, you’re looking at NPSs, obviously most your global companies have to deal with, you know, a 24 by seven org.
I mean, that’s, that’s becoming the, the standard, especially if you’re, you know, selling software or you’re a solution provider that’s, You know, or just pretty much anyone selling anything at this time, and that’s becoming, I guess, maybe easier to support via the cloud. Obviously, you know, you have to design and deliver the right type of support for that model.
From your experience, as you kind have seen, you know, 24 by seven orgs, you know, built and, and maintained, how does the cloud help in achieving.
Eric Labourdette: So obviously on, on the cloud service aspect, you get a very high level of [00:12:00] expectation from the customer. I mean, everybody’s facing all those cloud services. You, you want it now and you want to work nonstop and and so on.
So you need to adapt to that. So you need to build a 24 7 organization. A key thing is the first level. So you need to, you set in place a process of escalation. And how you, you can better serve your customer. So you need a new first, new first level of, of support what we call l l one with a 24 7 network, operation center.
You, you can set it up with globally distributed, or you can have in one location with shift. People, right? They can cover nights, they can cover weekends and so on. So it’s based on you know, the, the, the budget you get, you know, the location you are, the customer you have and so on. Or it can be a mix.
It can be a mix of, you know, local people with shift and, and distribution across the globe to get a, a better coverage. So that’s, that’s a key thing. And, and how your, your [00:13:00] no can bring you as much value as you can, meaning by that, that that is gonna be the first one to monitor your, any incident in production.
And, and you want to make sure that your no is empowered to address, you know, simple issues and, and as fast as you can. So you can meet your SLA and so on. Next level is to escalate to your tech organization with, takes a bit more time, but you can bring experts on, on, on board to make sure you, you understand the issue and, and address that.
So in term of a team distribution, I find it always better to have a, a global team, you know, in, in multiple location for, for a lot of different reason first to have a better coverage. You know, to have a, what we call the follow the sun approach, right? You can have team in the us, in Europe, in Asia to make sure that at any given time, if you get an issue, you can have someone that can [00:14:00] address, you know, this issue from the Jacobs team you know, during the daytime.
You know, it’s always easier to have someone addressing the program during their day shift instead of having someone call at 2:00 AM in the morning. So if you get this possibility, having a a global team is fantastic to get a better support and do this for the sun. And also in your brings, another element is about the risk management.
And you, these days you’ve got a lot of new attrition as you know, the great resignation and so on. You have your great skillset sets across the globe. You get great engineers in Eastern Europe, in Europe, in Asia in India and so on. And you need to leverage that because it’s always difficult as when you drive an organization to, to have the right skillset.
And you cannot have. Put all your risk in one location. So I think this distributed team will help you out to bring this value and the correct support. [00:15:00] And the last thing I mention for me is about also mixing contractors and full-time employees you know, with contractor it provides a lot of flexibility, that it’s always more difficult to get from a full-time employees.
You know, hiring someone takes a long time and, and getting on board. So having a mix of contractor dealing with different agencies that can bring your expert on board, your either temporary or long term with the staff augmentation is great because you get minimize your risk. From the runtime standpoint and distribution is key, but you need to also be close to your customer.
So always have a local presence to make sure that you can talk to your customer regardless where they are. But a, a global distribution with a startup implementation. Absolutely. I, I
Amir Bormand: like that you know, that that flexibility from the contractor side bring you that expertise. To kind of fill out this, this, you know, 24 by seven seven model, I guess when you were mentioning, [00:16:00] you know, you, you, I guess you touched on the NPS a couple of times and you know, you’ve mentioned a couple times how valuable that is in overall.
You know, establishing, let’s say, let’s say you, you’re building out this 24 7 capability and, and you’re building out this team different geographies, h h how do you, I guess, also go about building out that initial, you know, you know, survey, like I guess at this point you’re, you’re building out a new team, you know, you’re trying to measure the, the customer satisfaction, how it’s working for people.
What aspects are you looking to test an early stage team like this?
Eric Labourdette: Obviously in your survey you get are quite diverse in a way. Obviously customer are more vocal when something doesn’t work that works unfortunately. So, when everything works, people expect that and, and you don’t get any feedback, but when something happens, so right away, you know what’s going on.
So it, it’s already about e either defining the, the root cause of your issue, right. And sending survey. That you [00:17:00] can highlight efficiency, you can bring in your process or in your run time or in your product and so on. So we’re trying to focus just question based, based on that and what you want, get outta it.
So it’s, it’s a tricky in your things to do but always open question, open your section to our customer to, to command and get more insight.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. And, and I guess, you know, just to touch on one thing about, you know, team distribution, the challenge obviously you, you highlighted having some, a team that’s, you know, working in shifts versus local presence.
I guess when you’re looking, you know, at, at building out that type of team and you’re looking at the actual local presence, so hire somebody, Indian, infr, geo geographical locations. As you’re going through that process, and let’s say it’s, you know, first time you’re doing that for, for the company, The interview process itself has to be a little bit tricky cuz obviously you’re trying to engage with resources, different time zones, different, you know, [00:18:00] culture, different language, all these different things.
H h how, how, what have you seen in the past help you achieve like, efficiency in that interview process? Because that could, that could, that could take some time.
Eric Labourdette: Yeah. So, you know, the technical aspect, obviously I, I don’t interview people from the technical standpoint anymore, but so, and technical aspect can be learned in, in a way.
So, for me it’s all about people behavior, you know, how the, the, the react to your open questions and, and soft skill in a way because it, it’s to serve the customers, to air them out. So it’s someone that needs to be, Curious about the technique, but also what’s going on and the customer. So it’s all about your, your mindset and more than the technical aspect of it.
Because once again, all the technical aspect, every company, every software is different. You’re gonna learn that over time and you’re gonna get this expertise. So it’s all about providing the good experience and you need to have, [00:19:00] A coherence in a way in, in the team, right? People that are willing to help, people that are willing to, to, to curious, to, to address the issue and fix it.
Right? And that’s, you know, the most difficult things to, to get right. So I think interview process is all about, you know, getting these feelings that people going to get along and, and do the right.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. I, I think yeah, th this topic we could probably talk for, for hours on. I, I, I think we, we hit a lot of excellent points.
I wanted to thank you for coming on and sharing, I know it’s broad. I think you did a great job of kind of hitting some of the, some of the key points. So I’d like to ask guests if they had the opportunity to ask a future. To cover a specific topic or answer a question on a future podcast episode, what you’d like to hear about.
Eric Labourdette: Yeah, sure. So, something we haven’t got a chance to talk a lot is about. So s team you know, site reliability and engineering, it’s something that we hear a a lot these days. You know, [00:20:00] everybody’s facing the challenge to put that in place. You know, cloud operation is all about automation these days, you know, DevOps and so on.
And recently we, we come up with a new sre. So it’s coming out of new Netflix and Google, but nobody can meet new those people. In a way, everybody has different challenges, so how you address new your SRE challenges and what is SRE for you because there’s a lot of interpretation of SRE and, and how we can implement that.
I think it’s a great topic to, to cover these.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. I like that a lot. What, and if somebody does wanna reach out to you if there’s anything you’ve said or just in general based on hearing you on the podcast, what, what’s a good way of getting ahold of you?
Eric Labourdette: Sure. So you can, you know, reach me on, on LinkedIn on, on my profile or send me an email to eric lab net.
And, and I’m gonna try to, to answer the best I can to any question you might.
Amir Bormand: Awesome. Thank you for that and I appreciate your time. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing. [00:21:00]
Eric Labourdette: You’re welcome. It was a pleasure of talking to you guys.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. That’s it for this episode. We’ll be back again.
Different guests, different topic. Two things. One I think Eric’s topics is great talking about s e teams and there’s nuances to every company and, and a slightly different version, and I think. That’s, that’s the least of the challenges. So I’d love to have somebody, Anna, talk about that. So if you know somebody or you yourself would like to talk about.
Please let me know. I’d love to have you on. Secondly, if you like the podcast share with somebody else that might like it, that’s something I always like to see. That’s how we’ve been growing. And secondly, if you do leave a rating on the platform of your choice that you listen to this podcast on, that’s how it benefits the growth of the podcast.
It’s kind of like a twofold thing, sharing it, the ratings. So everyone who does that, I appreciate it. Until next time, thank you. And.