Tracy-Ann Palmer: Cutting Cloud Costs and Unlocking Peak Performance

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, we're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian for the channel partners Expo. It actually officially opens this afternoon. The expo. It's been MSP Summit. Yesterday was in full full swing, and it's been going great. Yeah,

Tracy-Ann Palmer  0:19  
it's packed. It's pretty packed, and it's been great to bump into a lot of old friends, actually a lot of old acquaintances. That's been awesome. Yeah, yeah,

Chip Rodgers  0:27  
for sure. So I'm so excited to be joined by Tracy Ann Palmer, affectionately known as TAP by almost everybody, right? Everybody. So, so great to have you on and tap. And so for anybody that, just as by way of introduction, Tracy Ann has been Gosh, you've hit all the high points within the technology industry with Cisco, Salesforce, AWS, RackSpac, VMware, and now you're advising ExoStellar, which is a startup, and I love to hear that story, because it's really, really a great story. So welcome Tracy, yeah,

Tracy-Ann Palmer  1:11  
thank you chip. It's so great to be back here with you. It's wonderful. Last time I saw chip was actually a couple of years ago, so it's great to get connected and reacquainted again. Ex Estella, I want to just tell you about this incredible organization. So it's a startup, and the CEO is Tony Shakib, who is a VP GM from Microsoft. And yeah, he came to say, Hey, listen, I'm going to get this startup off the ground, incredible technology. Never seen anything like it before. I was actually born out of Cornell University. We still have, actually one of the original PhDs with us, zooming Chen, who is the co founder, and they have developed a middleware technology that sits inside of the customer's environment, and it's got all the AI configurations, algorithms, all of that built in. Here's the linchpin. It reduces customers cloud costs. We're in the AWS ecosystem right now by anywhere from 60 to 80% it's incredible. It's incredible. No no interference, no human intervention whatsoever. Automated dynamic migration. And essentially, what it's doing is, if you think about your CPU environment, it is ebbing and peaking with your workload provisioning, without DevOps teams and engineering teams having to touch anything.

Chip Rodgers  2:56  
It's optimizing the contract to match your actual consumption.

Tracy-Ann Palmer  3:02  
That's it. Yeah, it's, it's matching the CPU and the memory, yeah, and so as your workloads are, you know, you've got your peaks and your valleys, right? As that is happening, it is automatically, dynamically, Epping and flowing with those peaks

Chip Rodgers  3:20  
and valleys. That's amazing.

Tracy-Ann Palmer  3:21  
It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. You know, when I was introduced to the company, you know, I said, absolutely I would, I'd love to jump in. I'd love to help from a channel perspective, and get the right partners in place. We actually have Parasoft is one of our major partners right now, which you know, you know them very, very well, and we are working on many, many more within that environment. We have a vahi, which is another company. We have IO connect services. And of course, AWS is our strategic partner. But really their technology is absolutely incredible, and this is a mandate from every single executive, how am I cutting down on my cloud costs?

Chip Rodgers  4:07  
That's amazing. That's great. That's a great place to be spending your your time and helping advise them. And sounds like they really can use the help right on the channel side. And so here we are at channel partners, and you had a session yesterday about unlocking peak performance for your company. So talk a little bit about that and what, what was your What was your message there to all the partner folks here,

Tracy-Ann Palmer  4:35  
yeah, you know, I've been studying peak performance in humans for the last two years, and I have developed what I call the peak code, which I've trademarked, and it's around three pillars. We've been doing things wrong. We think it's all about working harder, going. Foster. The reality is there are three things that drive you to sustainable growth, performance and agility, and it's what I call consistency, commitment and courage. Commitment means, what is your commitment to your customer? Are you over delivering, under promising, or are you promising and non delivering? Right? So that's number one. But you know, I've broken it down into a playbook specifically for MSPs, with the full life cycle of how they can go about doing this within their own environments in the next 90 days. The next piece is about consistency. We all know that most of us don't do something consistently, but in terms of a company, this is all about operational excellence. It's about sustainability. Most companies sort of stop at, oh, we have ad hoc knowledge, right? So that's the knowledge that exists in the company. Then we have document processes. They don't get too systematic, where you have workflows and then optimization. So what happens is, especially from an MSP perspective, you know, most MSPs only get to a certain stage. So I've done a contrast of investigating the top companies and what they're doing and what they're achieving versus average, and these are the three things that matter. The last one is courage. Yeah, right. Courage is about, are you willing to make the hard decisions? Are you willing to get rid of the product that's not profitable? Are you willing to get rid of the customers that are not right for your business, right? But are you willing to do hard. To do the hard. This is the hardest one.

Tracy-Ann Palmer  7:04  
Are you willing to take the steps you need to take to really get the company to where it needs to go? So it was a great session. It was an hour long. And, you know, I got a lot of, you know, people were snapping pictures. I said, No, you know, I'll give it all to you, right? I'll send you everything. It was great. But, you know, it was more about, I really love helping companies be

Chip Rodgers  7:32  
successful. It's something that MSPs, I think, could really use, because a lot of them are, you know, small organizations that are sort of building and want to get get bigger, clearly, and, and so that's those are some. That's some really great advice to get there. Yeah, well, and there's

Tracy-Ann Palmer  7:49  
a big difference between, you know, I mean, if you think about it, the average MSP is that, you know, a 10 to 12% growth. And MSP that is a high growth, you know, 24 to 36% growth. There's a, you know, I predicted this. I don't, if you remember, I predicted this three years ago, that we're going to see this major expansion and then consolidation in the last 18 months, 22% acquisition. That's going to just say it's incredible. Yeah, it's really incredible. So, yeah, it was a great session, but it's really been derived out of this. This in depth, you know, look at, how do we perform, and then how do companies perform?

Chip Rodgers  8:33  
Well, that's fantastic. Tap. So what, what are you thinking for the rest of the event? What's what's on the what's on the What are you trying? What are you hoping to achieve and get get from, you know, networking and connecting here at at channel partners,

Tracy-Ann Palmer  8:49  
yeah. So chip, the first thing is, there's a lot of AI sessions, and I want to go and really get up to speed on what's happening from a use case perspective. So that's on my charter for today. Second is reconnecting with a lot of you know, partners and certainly acquaintances, friends, colleagues that I haven't seen for a while. And then also, listen, this is a massive, large event. There are incredible companies here. I walked through the expo and I'm like, I don't even know all these companies. I need to know all these companies. And

Chip Rodgers  9:27  
I've been in this business for a long time, 30

Tracy-Ann Palmer  9:29  
years. Okay, so I've got some work to do here in the next two days.

Chip Rodgers  9:33  
That's fantastic. Well, tap, thank you so much for spending some time with us and and sharing. You know, sharing what's what's happening in your world and how it can apply to MSPs and and channel partners. And this has been fantastic. I really appreciate it. Yeah,

Tracy-Ann Palmer  9:49  
thanks a chip. And it was so good to see you. And we will do this again soon, I'm sure. Likewise, likewise.

Chip Rodgers  9:54  
That's fantastic. And thank you all for joining, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. I.

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