Keep It Simple: A Fresh Take on Bare-Metal Provisioning and Automation | Interview with Michael Wagner and Ian Evans, Co-Founders of Metify

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts with a digital workspace inner workings.

Let me start firstly, by welcoming you onto the digital workspace works podcast. I don't know who was to kick off, maybe it's the first time in a long time I've had more than one person to talk to. So does the intro first or you can tag team You're welcome. Good to hear about your company.

Michael Wagner 0:44
Cool. Yeah. So um, yeah. And I'm happy to go for first year. So Mike Wagner, CEO and co founder of Metify. And I guess I can just jump into a quick background if you'd like and, okay, so we'll actually maybe we'll do the quick intros first Ian go ahead. And you know, who are you, sir? Sure. So

Ian Evans 1:07
Ian Evans, CTO from Metify. A little bit of my background, I've been in the data centre space, for a very long period of time, I've worked in pretty much every vertical known to man, have a lot of experience in healthcare. You know, I've worked in the federal space, I've worked for integrators. So yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty cool. We we've kind of taken all of that experience. And really, what we'll talk to you about today is how we kind of built the product, the Metapod, product around all those experiences really kind of owned it, and it's something that people consume. So yeah, really excited to talk to you today.

Michael Wagner 1:49
And then my background a little bit, been a computer geek, since as long as I can remember, just always fascinated by the technology and whatever I could, you know, build from it. So I started coding when I was in seventh grade, ish, and then started working for IBM got kind of lucky with that gig. But I started working with IBM while still in college, like guess, whatever. And then, from IBM, I went to Red Hat's and then Red Hat got bought by IBM again. And so right, right around the time that that was announced, I was in Channel Sales, I was running a new group within Red Hat Channel Sales, I had the opportunity to help build and launch our apex partner programme, which was focused on si s, and essays in particular, that knew how to build application stacks were solid with OpenShift were solid with Ansible. So guys, that really understood the DevOps space. And frankly, the digital transformation that was really just beginning on the application side, Docker changed everything. And it took a little bit to figure out how to best enable containers to do these really cool things that they can do with from a velocity, reliability, you know, the CI, CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment patterns, and how that can absolutely be a competitive advantage, right. So had a chance to be a part of that, kicking that off with Red Hat. And then that's exactly how I met Ian, he was sort of the top architect for the open group at one of our largest s sighs and he showed me his thesis around bare metal provisioning. And I immediately knew that we were on this that he was onto something and and I would love to be a part of it. So as you know, entrepreneurially minded always, you know, once the IBM announced they were going to be purchasing Red Hat. And then they pivoted at Red Hat actually pivoted out of the product because IBM already had something. So we realised that this would be perfectly served by a startup. And that's what created Metify so here we are.

Ryan Purvis 4:07
And that, that gap, I'd almost say it was created. I mean, did you have something already built? Well, it was a case of finding a client and building at the same time while you were flying, I guess.

Michael Wagner 4:19
Well, we had a beta in mind and Ian had it sort of mentally worked out and then we did work on development a bit while at while I was with Red Hat, but it was really nascent right these are these are sort of just high level ideas and we had to force in a you know, frankly, Red Hat stuff to make it make it work. Ian's vision was broader and deeper and more open if you will, then then even an open sources you know, and the redhead inclusion of what we initially base the product round was protocol managed IQ, really excellent product, it was brought in as an acquisition. But, you know, they pivoted on did that and we saw that he had always had a sort of a bigger vision for it that we were able to embrace 100% as once we launched, and we really couldn't do it any other way. And it it's interesting because a lot of analysts were reviewing this space. And really, the consensus always was, the only way to do this is with a startup that is not tied to any of the big OEMs. You know, Hewlett Packard or Dell or super micro, because otherwise, who would take you seriously. And you know, the proprietary platforms are already doing similar things that we do, but just in a much more complex and sort of bloated fashion, if you will. So for us it was about making it simple. And Ian Ian, you know, has a he's worked with military, navy, in particular in the past and, and that that simple, keep it simple, stupid analogy coming out of its Old Navy, saying in the US here, really was a guiding principle to how he wanted his vision to come together. And that's it's been an interesting, that's another story talking about, you know, development, product development, and all the different shapes that that takes and the fights that you have to have, even as a founder to bring your revision to bear. It was really it's been a it's been a really fun and wild, wild journey. But yeah, yeah, we had absolutely the vision in mind and the ability to sort of beta almost alpha testing, if you will, with some of the biggest companies on Earth. And that was the thing that really pushed us to doing this, right. We had companies, literally the biggest in financial services, the biggest intellicode, the biggest in manufacturing, saying, Wow, we want to buy this, but there was no product. You know, so what a fun, what a really fun problem to have.

Ryan Purvis 6:49
Yeah, a good place to be. So maybe Ian since we've talked about your vision a few times, let's let's hear a bit about that, if you can keep Yeah, keep it layman layman. Yeah, absolutely.

Ian Evans 7:01
So, you know, I think at the end of the day, your Mike did talk a little bit about it. But I just, I've used a lot of these technologies. In the Data Centre, I've used different automation frameworks in the data centre, I just felt like everything was a little bit too complex, you know, it just, there wasn't really a really good cohesive solution, there's a lot of separate tools all over the place, and customers just getting really frustrated with having to use all those diverse tool sets and not really get the outcomes they need from a sustainability perspective. And, you know, things like, you know, the control capex and opex, were really a challenging thing. So, as I looked at it, and I looked kind of brought the vision together as like, you know, there's, there's really good opportunity to take all this, bring it into a single kind of unified framework and toolset, and then allow customers of varying skill to be able to use it, that's the other thing that was a vision for us is, you know, we we want to appeal to the developer, you know, kind of like the nerd, if you will, that knows how to use this stuff and knows how to rallies, automation, scripts, and frameworks and all this. But we also wanted somebody say, at a CXO level to be able to go in quickly go into the tool, and know what it's all about and start automating stuff. So our vision was very broad, you know, we wanted to cover that entire organisation, because we understand that in order for a private data centre to be successful, you really have to have the buy in for the from the CXO level, you know, at the high level in the organisation. So for us, that was extremely important. You know, we wanted to have quick acquisition of assets as an example, you know, you have a lot of different systems within all these infrastructures. And it's, it's relatively hard for organisations to identify those assets quickly and use them in an intelligent way. So one of the things we really want to focus on is, is rapid identification of those assets. So there's less time, you know, combing through all of this, this infrastructure and trying to find what you need. And the tool will be focused on really identifying those as quick as possible, and then getting it into the hands of the consumer to the point where they can actually deploy their application stack on top of it. So like our our whole transformation, and this really was under the hood with all this infrastructure stuff, like you see in the public cloud. Customers don't necessarily care. They just wanted to do certain things, they want to see a result. So we saw it as an opportunity to let the customer focus more on the application and the outcomes for the business in terms of how the applications concerned and less on a lot of the very tedious aspects of server provisioning that they normally experience within the data centre.

Michael Wagner 9:39
There's a huge manual effort that's required to do the things that we enable automagically via Mojo platform, and that's that's where we are working with some some larger size and data centres, the ability to focus people on things of value instead of these highly manual error prone activities is, is a real efficiency driver. And one of the core reasons why enterprises adopt our tool.

Ryan Purvis 10:14
And you because you mentioned public cloud, I assume you mean, the Azure is the Google clouds. Amazon world. Yeah, these are customers that are going and renting servers space in a data centre, you know, they own their own servers, and it doesn't matter, but they don't have that layer in between, and you guys provide that layer is that the right understanding

Michael Wagner 10:37
little different. So the hyper scalars have their offering, and they make it incredibly easy for enterprises to spin up servers, at will, okay, so, and in fact, it created such a, it created a problem, frankly, for enterprises, it was called the shadow it, you know, groups, individual, you know, Software Group, so just grab, you know, some, some easy to instances and spin up servers, and that caused all kinds of security problems. And there were some rather public things that occurred. But so it's a real nightmare for a CFO, CIO, CTO to have to deal with that, right. So reining in shadow IT. And the reason it's all happening is because these Amazon's these hyper scalars make it so easy. So what we what we did is we took lessons learned from the enterprise security considerations from the enterprise, from working with these customers directly, you know, we got to be in their cold rooms and see what they're going through, see the pain points that they have. And we sort of distilled that into a brand new best of breed product that leverages only modern technologies, and the latest open standards that frankly, weren't around six years ago. So this wasn't possible, more than six years ago. Okay, so the open standards just weren't agreed to, and they weren't ubiquitous as they are now. So that's the big, the big thing that happened for us. So what we did is we created that layer of simplicity at the hyper scalars already have. So hyper scalars have it, we brought it so you can take that if you layer, if you will bring it on your side of the firewall, and allow you to DIY very simply your own private clouds. And really, it's a Hybrid Hybrid Cloud situation.

Ryan Purvis 12:26
Great. So you mentioned Mojo Mojo, at least, how does that differ from from the company? Or is it is Metify. Also product was just Mojo?

Michael Wagner 12:35
Yeah. So it's just so Mojo platform and photon are sort of our two main products Mojo platform, is the the one that's gotten the most attention, and has the most well, yeah, the most installations and from an enterprise perspective. So and partnerships with some, you know, some of our big partners that we rely on, frankly, I mean, they're, they're really great. So, and module platform is the bare metal provisioning solution. That is, you know, what makes everything very simple and provides that cloud like experience for enterprises from, you know, five servers up to, you know, 50,000. So it really doesn't matter. From a scale perspective, we can go and, you know, have customers that have looked at it for hundreds of 1000s of nodes. And it's the cool thing about this is with the evolution of the edge, right, and with the evolution of data centres, as we know it. The digital workplace is driving this a lot, right? The at home remote office situation, you know, everyone became remote, overnight, practically. And there's all sorts of considerations there that no one was ready for. And that includes security, the overall experience that what is the experience of your workers, like at home, you know, trying to figure out the best possible experience while still providing the necessary security and governance over that new extended office model, which used to be handled by a single router, and a few servers in a particular office. Now you've got 1000s of routers, right? So that that's a really interesting challenge. And we're still building out the infrastructure to handle that from a. This is this is a local, regional telco statement and digital provider statement overall, right? So we've got solutions that work really nice in that space. So there's some strong drivers of that that we've built Mojo platform to be able to assist with, and then also photon. When COVID hit, we helped build out the infrastructure that was required for rural wireless broadband, to help to help teachers allow them to connect and have a good experience with their classes. That was right in Ian's backyard, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. So if you can and there's no tougher environment that I can picture. I just, I mean, it's granite mountains with lots of pine trees. And so dense foliage with impenetrable bass is a really tough thing to deal with. So, but yeah, so we learned some really cool lessons. And that's some more IP that we created. from a company perspective, it was incredibly rewarding just to be able to help out during that time. But now, the union of those two products has has really brought us into some interesting opportunities, and some really, really fun problems to solve. As we, as a country, try to address making sure that everyone has the same access and, you know, equality from a technology perspective to learn and do what they need to do from wherever they may be. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 15:56
I mean, that sounds like a beautiful landscape that you describe the current rocks and pine trees and stuff. I mean, I'm down in South Africa at the moment that realness is a big factor in driving new areas, and, and you know, the old townships and they still live townships and shanty towns and all that kind of stuff, where the local buyers have provided connectivity, but there's still gaps. So actually, I'd love to explore the photon product with you guys separately, just to understand how that works. And see if you know, while I'm still here connected to some people. While you're saying that I was thinking about the digital workspace, and we didn't ask that sort of usual question. And you know, what does digital workspace mean to you? But I was also thinking about you this as a server player, but are you actually deploying end user devices as well into the cloud? So hosting, sort of virtual desktops?

Michael Wagner 16:47
Yeah, so not hosting virtual desktop? Well, we actually could, but that's not an area. So I'll let Ian go deep on this. But this is exactly where photon and Mojo mesh, and en developed, you want to design horn. So I'll, I'll do a forum here. But he developed a just a bullet proof, enterprise router, but for the home. And so this is, I mean, it's a product we know that we could launch and do extremely well with right now, commercially, but we're a software company. So we're kind of weighing the value, and we're picking our picking our partnerships very carefully. And working in that way to best take advantage of the IP that we have. But we've we've used it for years. It's an incredible piece of really technology. And, and in many ways, as When Ian talked about his background experiences, this was this was his distillation of years of frustration and years of trying to get good signal through his, you know, Rubicon of, you know, wireless impossibilities on the mountain. And, and the artspring of that was, was photon, the photon router, and it's just a, it's a beast. So get from that, even if you want to discuss the CPE. And the full solution, man might as well, we got time, right? Yeah,

Ian Evans 18:17
I mean, I'll give you definitely a good overview of it here. So photon, it's interesting, because like Mike said, there was a lot of frustration around delivery of technology in these rural areas, right. And I was one of those people coming up in the mountain knives, I was very frustrated, couldn't get a really good signal up here at all, you know, you're kind of stuck in these situations, we're using these monolithic hotspots, and you just literally want to take it and with a hockey stick, and punk punted down the hill, right? So I, you know, I just got to the point where, okay, there's a better way to do this. I was, you know, a dmts at Verizon at the time. So I use a lot of this technology, it was in my daily activities, and you know, designing all sorts of technologies for wireless communications and stuff. So, took that expertise we built I built a kind of a custom router footprint that was highly optimised and just started kicking the tires on it, see how it did initially. And it actually turned into something where it was it was significantly better than anything out there. And the outcomes were, were great. So we so so I effectively optimised it, packaged it up, put my own automation in it, and started deliberate to a bunch of different customers in these very hard to reach areas. I mean, like Mike said, there's areas where these customers have literally zero connectivity, or they're in a situation where they are getting such low and lousy bandwidth outcomes that they just, they don't want to work and they can't work from home. So by enabling that bringing the wireless service up here, and then taking that and delivering it down to the customer. It was just an amazing experience to see people be able to work and see kids be able to actually do school from home rather than having to go sit in front of a library, you know and work out a hotspot, right? So, so it was a good testbed for us with mojo two, because you like Mike said, we're we're kind of merging these products together as a connectivity solution there. And as we push Mojo out to the edge, and we start to automate things at the edge, of course, you need some connectivity solutions for that, right. So we're taking that we're kind of stitching it in there. And then when people need to do remote data centre provision in small edge based data centres or small deployments, well, there's a great solution for that. And we're automating all that in there. And, you know, we're integrating all sorts of great technologies, they're, like CVRs, citizens broadband, which is a, you know, kind of like, an open source is an open source element to it. But it allows companies like yourselves to be able to take LTE based technologies with 5g technologies and push it out to the edge. So So yeah, we're very much focused on that area. And we look forward to seeing what it can do for Mojo, I think, is a great opportunity here.

Ryan Purvis 21:04
So just explain to me, so it's photon a hardware device.

Ian Evans 21:09
It's, it's like consider it a product. It's essentially a product. So it's, it is a hardware device, but it also has a custom software stack on it. But it's, it's highly optimised. So yeah, almost considered like a deliverable type of router. But there's also a service that's kind of attached to it, you know, it's kind of one of those things where you have to have all the elements there to really get that customer outcome you want. So we photon the product is the connectivity is part of that. And then you have the router, then you have the software, all that comes into a nice kind of automated package. This delivered to the customer. I mean,

Michael Wagner 21:43
one of the things I think that might be the most relatable to kind of put it in frame for you, how many times have you had to push the power button on your router? Because your signal was messed? Okay, so we've never had to do that. So with the there's a self correcting, there's automation that Ian has built in, to essentially make that not happen, you know, so we've, we have devices up for for years without a single cold reboot, you know. So that's the type of resilience and reliability mindset that in approach this with, and, and he's fanatical about it. I mean, you know, and the cool part was, inside the industry, there's, there's, there's secrets, there's known secrets, with the hyper scalars, frankly, right with some of the biggest and best companies, they, they, they know they have tricks. But so we took some of those tricks and really built upon them, because no one is the hyperscalers aren't leveraging this for home use. And that's where you can really had a lot of fun. And there's definitely some intellectual capital that will keep us trade secrets, but they're great. And, you know, we look forward to providing this. It's definitely a better experience across the board, which is, which is something that we're also trying to change the language on a little bit. And it's difficult to explain to imagine yet so it's difficult to explain to a local development groups, state and local governments that we don't need that much bandwidth. Now, it's good, we're happy to take it and we'll certainly, you know, bring in fibre and work with fibre whenever possible, okay, so don't get me wrong, there's no, there's no way to replace a fibre connection is a beautiful thing. Even though we are beaming beaming up to his mountain, but that's another story. So it's a you can do a lot with wireless, but fibre is always preferred. But the key is the experience for the customer. So quality of experience should be the measure not bandwidth, because it's bandwidth is often a lie. You know, you could be getting a couple 100 megabytes in, but you're not getting nearly enough up. So you end up with a lot of jitter you end up with a lot of what are called buffer bloat. And and it's the inefficiencies within the router itself that just caused the experience to go into the toilet. And what does the broadband company say to you? They say, well, on our end, it's pinging fine. You've got we get 200 up, and you know, or I'm sorry, 200 down and 10 up, everything looks fine. But your experience is garbage. Right? Yeah.

Ian Evans 24:24
And that's right. And I think there should never be a situation where a customer when you're, you're working on a on a product with delivering it to a customer and you have a corner of the market right and you're trying to twist their arm into something that you know is not going to be very optimal for them. So like even even though we have areas where we're literally the only provider because you know for years and years and years customers couldn't get anything we finally delivered it. And we we felt like we're going to deliver this same exact outcome to that customer that a customer that would Be completely served the site two or three different providers, so they're very thankful of that it also puts you in a good position. Because if you do have a competitive product that comes in a competitive company, you're viewed very favourably with that customer, you know, so you don't really have to explain a whole lot. And if you deliver, like, I think we're doing quite well. I don't you have to explain, you know, too much. So, yeah, we we are extremely happy with what's been delivered. uptimes are great. Like Mike said, you know, we feel like we fixed a lot of these problems around buffer bloat and latency. And that, you know, customers are just, it's it, we get a lot of great feedback. Yeah,

Michael Wagner 25:38
it's gonna be, it's gonna be very fun. As a startup, you know, we it's been setting you loose kind of, on, on whatever really interests him. In this particular space, right, and just optimising things. And there's a lot of technology integrations. That's, I guess that's the piece that's been hardest, and it makes it easy to understand why this problem has persisted as long as it has, because it really has to be approached from an enterprise reliability perspective. But we didn't have this need to do that to the home. So it was kind of a solution waiting for a problem. And, and then COVID hit and this became a well known ubiquitous problem. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so it's fun, it's gonna be a lot of fun to see what we end up doing with it. And we have some very interesting partnerships established around it, to do some huge, huge things. And we'll see

Ian Evans 26:36
that one last thing, there's that there's that there's that kind of like almost endless industry, arrogance, like, we are going to tell the customer what they need, and what we should deliver to him sort of asking the customer and understanding what they really need, right. So like, our product is based on, you know, our experiences, right, which are very important, obviously, for developing the product. But we're, everything that we built in is based on customer feedback, and, and you'd be the smallest customer at the most minut bandwidth requirement, but they still have very specific requirements. So we have made sure that we've got all that feedback, when we built it into the product, you know, as we rolled it out, so

Ryan Purvis 27:17
yeah, and I mean, if you go back, pre COVID, everything was built from for the enterprise, which was almost like the formula Formula One racing thing where the cars are designed for Formula One, and then you wait five years, and it'll become a consumer product. And that ABS braking took five years to get to the commercial car. And and the same sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. And I think not just COVID I think in a lot of senses, what Apple is doing with with bringing out iPhone, and iPad, and all that sort of stuff, changed the consumer view on it, because everything was just integrated and kind of worked. And there was no sort of challenges which Microsoft couldn't do for a long time. And they still can't do it. But But that sort of raises the expectation of a person, at however many Mac and it all just works. And I come to work, and I've got another device, and it doesn't all work. You know, why is that the case, which means everyone has to raise the game. And you know, your example of the reboot for the router, I mean, you know, being in South Africa the last couple of months. And if you guys know what load shedding is, but it's the national pastime would be turn the power off for two hours at a time and save the Save the power generation because of poor maintenance and all that other things. But one of the frustrations with that is even with ups and generators, all that kind of stuff. As you can see, you're walking around rebooting all your mesh nodes and, and routers, because they are they the power switching causes them to get out of sync and you're waiting 510 15 minutes at a time. So to not having to do that would be actually quite productive. productivity gain. And also, when you're I'm sitting at the edge of the country, on the on the coast, on a golf course, when the power goes out, my connectivity goes down, because all the towers going to reduce power mode, so your your full, your 5g becomes 4g. And if you're on 4g becomes 3g, the fibre will work for a period of time, but then they'll also run out of power if the loading is too long. And so something that deals with that and can improve the quality of experience, as you mentioned, is huge, hugely valuable, especially battery power. Yeah, built into it. We haven't got better already.

Ian Evans 29:24
Yeah, we definitely have some optimizations we put in around that. And, you know, the, I believe we'll probably talk about a little bit but a lot of the green infrastructure requirements, you know, these are things that we look at for the data centre, but we also have incorporated into our photon designs as well. And because you have such a minimal footprint, and a lot of these new nodes are so power efficient. I mean, you're talking about things you can put in the palm of your hand, you know, you can run off five volt, or you know, 12 volt DC, and you're literally running off the same power adapter that you run your hand right phone off, recharge your Android phone off of so it's so the efficiencies are there. And it's just a matter of, of course designing everything in a way that it's, it's consistent with the rest of the devices in the home. So yeah, we've been tackling that we've got a really good solution that covers all that.

Ryan Purvis 30:15
Great. Well, that's good to hear. I still want to have that conversation on the side is, I think, very interesting to see how that could apply out here. I would love to chat about the MLB Major League Baseball stuff. How do you want to

Michael Wagner 30:30
So you know, what's cool is perfect timing on this, they just released yesterday, the new products that are being integrated into their Hawkeye solution. So I guess we'll start at the beginning here. MLB, was introduced to us by one of the essays that were partnered with a group out of Canada, Toronto, Canada, called Arctic. And they were the top anthos implementer globally for Google. So Google anthos, of course, is Google's container application platform that is competitive with OpenShift and rancher and tanzu, VMware tanzu. These are the sort of Docker the next generation of container orchestration and application platforms that make it very easy to implement DevOps practices as well as you know, really that continuous integration, continuous delivery model that are continuous deployment model that we discussed earlier. So, when they came to us, they had this need, they wanted to move all of their stadiums to bare metal. And this is covered much better than me, by the way, in the Major League Baseball has a advanced technology blog, a technology blog, that's on medium. And Kevin Backman wrote a great article on this guide is a year and a half ago. And there's diagrams in there and everything else. It's just a fascinating read. Especially for anyone you know, that enjoys baseball and trying to understand how is this magic happening? Because MLB really led the charge from a digital perspective, right, creating this fan experience, that's it just changed the game, it literally changed the game. I mean, you know, Moneyball, the movie was made around techiques tracking every possible outcome in every possible situation, big data actually created a you know, a world series champion. And that's what you know, Moneyball was all about, right. And so, with Major League Baseball leading the way from a big data perspective, this was kind of a natural growth have that and they had their systems built out in, they had some really cool stuff happening for their fans. But there was always a ways to make it better ways to make it more cost effective ways to cut out travel and expenses related to having to go to the stadiums directly. So they had a vision to do that. And critical in that was being able to remotely discover, provision and manage bare metal at each of the ballparks. And that's where that's where we came in. So we were introduced, they knew we had a platform to do that. And it was honestly, it was just a hand in glove thing. I mean, we were essentially hired and asked to put it in production in a week. So yeah, it took you know, a few weeks to get her done. There's quite a few stadiums, but it was a that's a, you know, another really fun thing that we get to experience here at Metify. And with the solution that we have with mojo platform, is you get introduced to these different teams, and they all have different skill levels. And they all have different pain points that they're trying to fix, right, they all have different visions for where they want to take their technology. MLB is so MLB has a separate, they have an internal consulting group MLB advanced media, these guys are really good. I mean, they they were their own company. And I believe and I need I really should check the history on this. I know that they were acquired by Major League Baseball and just rolled in at some point. So you know, they recognise that, hey, these guys are good enough and we're paying them enough we might as well bring him in. Right? As you know, when you're MLB I think you can you can make moves like that. Right? So as Major League Baseball, advanced media, they've just done some amazing things and you know, getting to work with that group was really a treat in terms of professionalism and just the way they run their organisation. So it's Felipe groan who's the their vice president of it. Kevin Backman, who is the senior architect and Google Cloud fellow that brought us in and kick tires on Mojo platform to get this all started just you know these guys are really good at on the network side too. They're just exceptional so So yeah, that's that was the challenge. Make it happen for us guys. It was right in our wheelhouse. We knocked it out of the park pun intended and We've been growing with them for a couple years now, you know, so now we've got some of the minor league ballparks that are coming up. And there's challenges there. Because they're, you know, the facilities are much different. And, you know, depending on what we're working with, sometimes it's a, it's a, you know, a closet, sometimes it's now, we don't even see the sights, right? This is all done remotely for us. So however, they initially get the IPS handled, once they are in our database in our CMDB, we can then go out, discover, provision and do all the things they need to do to those nodes. And with with Google as our partner on this, the initial provisioning and operating system rollout, as well as the BIOS upgrades, and the integration of RAID and all that is what we we handled, and then anthos was layered on top of that. And we do have a service catalogue. So it's, you know, push button out those clusters, builds. And now, Major League Baseball, I think, handled things a little differently with the anthos cluster deployments specifically. But it's one of those things where if we wanted a custom script in our service catalogue, we could do that. So it would be a single push button deployment. But like I said, they're highly technical. And it's just a really good rock solid group of engineers over there. So I know they have some of their own magic that they they do as well. But that low level piece in particular, getting the bare metal ready maintaining the bare metal. And as a add, since there they are a target in many ways, right? We are in cyber warfare right now. With the globe, right? So from a security perspective, that's another area that we provided a lot more sort of robust security features that made him feel more confident and doing the things that they needed to do. And which is a that's an important point, I guess, if like backup, Ian has an extensive security background as well. And we built Mojo platform really foundationally with security as our first point of engineering that we knew we had to nail. So really feel good about how we set that up. And, you know, we have DoD designs as well, and, you know, worked with the DOD and from a security perspective. So, you know, we've had great experience in in making sure that it's hardened and ready to take on the Enterprise challenges of any any value from a target perspective, right, there's definitely some that Ray is high up on the on the attack surface list, if you will, of bad actors. You know, you got North Korea, Russia, China, really constantly attacking private enterprise now in the US, and it will inevitably, globally for that matter, right? At Iran. So yeah, it's really, we take that very seriously. And it's one of those things that I think you Ian's background made it important for us to make sure we deeply embedded that into the product

Ryan Purvis 38:06
slightly going back with the MLB stuff, you mentioned Hawkeye now in my knowledge of Hawkeyes morefrom I mean, you know, baseball understanding etcetera. But HawkEye was what what they were using cricket to monitor the ball travelling from one side to the other arriving at the batsman, it is at the same technology from the end of the pitcher to the to the catcher as the mean of the game and all the rest of it as well.

Michael Wagner 38:33
Exactly, so, so the HawkEye system that they had in place, and I'm looking at here, so they had 12, cameras total, and five, five of them operated at 100 frames per second. And now they have upgraded those this year. And that's what the article is about. And it's by Graham Goldbeck, who is one of their data experts. And these guys are like physics majors. I mean, these guys are really they got a wild crew of data specialists and I he's the guy I want to talk to you actually so but yeah, it the upgrade to the cameras now they made them three times as fast so I think it's 300 frames per second now. Yes, 300 frames per second for that that group of ultra fast cameras. And with those cameras, they can track ball spin, coming off the pitchers hand and now they're including new data points. Wow. Okay, so this I'll just I'm just gonna read this but feel their arm strength. So they're gonna know who's got the gun, you know, taking a hot play off of you know, third baseline zinging it over the first so yeah, they track player movement and now they'll be able to track arm strength 3d spin axis on the ball seem shifted wake. Oh, that's cool. So seems shifted wake I'm assuming they're talking about the wake of the airflow behind the ball, which is directly related to how which curve you're gonna get? So like, one of the things that they showed was, I have this in one of my decks to show customers because I do love, you know, the solution. It's just really cool. The Hawkeye solution, which is then feeds into Statcast, which all is, is on an application stack that is built upon servers provisioned and automated and maintained by Mojo platform. So you know, that's we get to be at the very base of that are in Kevin start. He has us at the top. They're kind of in but we're really all the way on the bottom. And, you know, we speak chip is kind of the, the Moto, right? I mean, we're below everything else, including the operating system. So So yeah, this this, this new revision of Hawkeye is going to do some really, really cool stuff. And yeah, it looks like it's already been applied. You whoever, you may have already seen some of this data feature during last year's from Run Derby. There you go. So yeah, it's, it's coming online to the world here. Right now. Baseball savant game day. So yeah. Oh, it's coming on later this month. In monster. Yeah. Okay. So it's very, very cool stuff. But certainly makes, you know, being involved in this space. Even more fun, right, when you get to work.

Ryan Purvis 41:21
Yeah, look, I mean, the end user experience is great, too. I mean, you know, there's no other platform that you can log into and watch any game you like, it's on, as long as it's obviously been played, or the day before, and see all sorts of interesting stats, you know, while they're playing. You know, the sport as it is right now.

Michael Wagner 41:40
Yeah. Yeah. Every time you see, like the people that they'll even talk about the spin live, right. So they'll, you'll see the 102 mile an hour, you know, pitch come across the plane, you're just like, Oh, my God, you know, how in the hell would anybody hit that thing? You

Ryan Purvis 41:54
know, exactly, exactly. So what's the future hold for you guys? I mean, what is the plan? You mentioned? Photon, you mentioned Mojo? I mean, is there another third product coming? Or is it really just continuing on?

Michael Wagner 42:08
Wow, this is this is it? And, and truly Well, you know, the union of the two I think, is the exciting thing in the future, certainly for us. But Mojo Mojo from a we've been in almost self imposed stealth. So we're kind of sharing some things with you that I don't even know if we shared with anybody before, frankly. But there's, we wanted to make sure our the product was essentially frictionless from a customer experience. So just like the digital experience is so important for the home. It's also incredibly important for directors of IT enterprise architects, CIOs, guys that would love to check out our product. So that's a piece that we're finalising now, to make it so they can download and use it for free on, you know, X amount of servers. And then if they found value in that, after they, you know, use it beyond a certain point, we would bring them into a subscription. But that's that's why we've kind of been in self imposed stuff. We've done no marketing, and no sales. Essentially, we have no sales group group or anything. And now, we actually were just funded by a really cool sports related venture capital company out of Green Bay, Wisconsin called Titletown. Tech. So that's another thing. Gosh, yeah. Well, that hasn't been announced yet. But so really excited about that. And they actually are funded by the Green Bay, Green Bay Packers are part of that. I'm familiar with the Packers. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. So Green Bay Packers are part of that Microsoft as part of that. And it's just a great group of guys up there. So with that, it enables us to do the things we wanted to do around marketing and awareness, and then have some fun, you know, just have continue having fun with this and expanding our use cases. And hopefully, because we are viewed as a competitive advantage, it would be great to get some more referenceable customers, but a lot of what we do is a tad secretive right now. So I look forward to hopefully, you know, just being able to continue doing what we're doing and make more people aware of how much Mojo platform can can do farm both from a efficiency optimization green data centre, you know, when you operate as low as us. It allows you to really tackle unique use cases and apply efficiencies that were otherwise not attainable, like I said a few years ago, without having the ubiquitous open standards now being adhered to, we can enable things that just weren't weren't doable before. So that's a big one. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 45:00
Just out of interest. I mean, do you have? If you don't have it's not a problem. I'm just wondering, do you have like a stat or a feel for how much more efficient or greener your solutions are versus say the market as a benchmark? was? Yeah.

Michael Wagner 45:15
Yeah, we've done modelling, right. And so this is a lot of this is driven around our partnerships. So there's leads, it's leads efficient products that you can work with, that greatly enhance the efficiency of a data centre. Similarly, there's low voltage home solutions that you can use that will massively drive efficiencies out of the home. So in terms of lowering the carbon footprint overall, there's a number of tricks that we are integrating into our product, and specifically the intelligence around power consumption, and workload, overall efficiency, we monitor all those things. So yes, we can spin up and spin down servers based on specific criteria that you can build into, that we can build into the product. And so yeah, there's, you know, it really just depends. I will say this, that, when talking about percentage gains, there are customers that we've worked with that have very old power hungry, hot as hell servers. Okay, so making the move into more power efficient footprints is a very important than necessary. First step, you cannot there's only so much you can do with the old gear. Okay. So, yeah, so we really, one of the things that we always try and guide and consult towards is embracing the new hardware, because you know, the efficiencies that are at the chip level at the board level, they can't be reproduced any other way. We can certainly provide intelligence around racks and rows, and which ones are hot, and which ones should be powered, cooled down a little bit, which workload should be shifted over to another cluster to try and you know, because that that rack is or that row is cooler, those types of efficiencies are built into the product as part of our green data solution, green Data Centre solution. But again, there's you hit a wall at some point, right? The real efficiencies are when you make the investment and get in. I should say the multiplier, a big multiplier is when you make the investment, get onto the newer hardware that's leads compliant, and then manage, monitor, optimise with the new stuff. That is where you get the big multiplayer. So it's difficult to ascribe a percentage, because it largely depends on what you're coming off of, you know? Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 47:50
I can understand that. Any closing thoughts? And maybe something from you to close out with?

Ian Evans 47:56
No, I think Mike covered a lot. A lot of it. We've got all sorts of great stuff going on. Obviously some of these things where we can't completely talk about but there's expect a lot of enhancements, a lot of releases a lot of areas of the market that we're going to tackle with both Mojo and photon, we've we've got a massive roadmap, we're looking forward to addressing all these things and improving customer outcomes in the data centre and also kind of slain the rural broadband space, you know, we want to continue to deliver quality service and disrupt we love disruption.

Ryan Purvis 48:29
Yeah, great. Yeah, that's it,

Michael Wagner 48:33
I was just gonna say on that. On the future front, I would be remiss not to point out the distributed Management Task Force, the dmtf, the great work that they're doing with the redfish specification, and the industry wide buy in, that's these are really important groups. So these open standards, organisations don't get enough credit for the hard work that they do to, you know, keep these, first of all, make make the redfish specification, what it is, and having the ubiquitous acceptance around it along with the Open Compute project along with open BMC. There's just a number of really great standards groups that have made this all all possible. And then that leverages the open source community to drive innovation. That was there's no way any single company could afford the research and development that's required to get all these API's built, you know, figure out what's the best next thing to integrate into the project itself. And so the guys at the dmtf and the redfish team is just doing an extended ecosystem is doing a phenomenal job of, you know, identifying where, what they should include next, what the next specification should roll in. And those schemas are being built out as we speak every day. And so our roadmap is beautifully built for us by these open standards groups. And we just built this wonderful interface that makes it extremely easy to flip those new abilities and standards. gets into a product and recognise the efficiencies that you can gain out of them really quickly.

Ryan Purvis 50:06
Fantastic. It'd be good to actually get a list of those organisations from you. Yeah. So I don't know them. So be good to just know of them and read up on them. If someone wants to get in contact with you, I mean, what's the best best way?

Michael Wagner 50:22
You know, just hit our website Metify.io. And you can call our we have a, you know, 800 number and as well as the demo requests, you can schedule a meeting with us directly from our website. So yeah, you know, multiple ways, just jump on the website or hit us on LinkedIn, whatever, whatever works out easiest for, you know, in this in this world of multi stream media, we're trying to be as present as possible out there. So

Ryan Purvis 50:50
fantastic. And I'm assuming that as much as you've got American clients you've talked about, but you're available global, anyone with a datacenter? Ready or server requirement?

Michael Wagner 51:00
We are Yes. And we have some European partnerships as well, as well as customers. So we love working over the pond whenever possible. And yeah, look forward to it. So

Ryan Purvis 51:13
lovely. Fantastic. Thanks very much, guys. It's been great chatting with you. And I wish you all the best. And thank you for delivering the MLB experience.

Michael Wagner 51:20
Yeah, absolutely. Ryan, pleasure meeting you.

Ian Evans 51:22
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Ryan Purvis 51:24
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