– My name is Kevin L. Jackson. You’ve probably heard of me when it comes to cloud computing, cybersecurity, and, most recently, digital transformation. I’m gonna be on the Break Free B2B episode. So if you wanna learn more about how to stand out in your industry, join us.
– Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Break Free B2B, where we are breaking down business and marketing topics to help you break free of whatever might be holding you back. My name is Nick Nelson. I am a Content Marketing Manager here at TopRank Marketing, and I am extremely excited today to chat with Kevin Jackson. Kevin is the CEO for GC GlobalNet and the Chief Operating Officer for SourceConnecte. And he is very into cloud computing, and that’s sort of his passion topic and something that he’s a major expert on. So really excited to talk about what’s happening in that world. What’s changing, what the challenges are, and how he’s recommending that people try to take advantage of the opportunities and breakthrough with them. So, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us.
– Thank you. I’m excited to be here with your audience.
– Yes, so I gave a little 500-foot overview there obviously very high level. Maybe you could share a little bit about yourself, what you do, and what your companies do.
– Yeah, sure. So I’ve actually been working in advanced technology for I guess 30 years. If you don’t tell anyone. Starting off in the military, where I was working with the Navy Space Technology Program, launched a few satellites, work with NASA and the New Horizons spacecraft on some payload processing, put a Shuttle on space station, sort of guiding the use of technology for business. When I was at JP Morgan Chase, and I was a global Vice President for IET during the Y2K period. And after that, I transitioned to IBM, where I was the worldwide Sales Executive for mobile wireless and voice. And that’s sort of where I got into sort of leveraging these technologies for business models service-oriented architecture and mobile devices that now referred to as cloud. Worked with the Intelligence Community as they built the Intelligence Community Cloud, deployed that and got back into industry, and started my first company, GC GlobalNet, in 2013, where I was working with government agencies, and commercial companies deploy redeploy the business models applications into the cloud. Then later, I was asked about working to transform the supply chain by leveraging cloud and advanced technology. And that’s where SourceConnecte came from. So now, I’m still helping multiple companies leverage cloud and leveraging these advanced technologies that digitize global supply chains.
– Awesome, It’s quite a journey. So one thing that you’ve said that I like is that if you think about, I mean, cloud computing is obviously very broad and kind of ambiguous, I think to people. One thing that I’ve seen you say is that if you think about it as just simply a software and a technology, you’re thinking about it wrong, maybe too narrow of a view, you talk about it as like a business strategy. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
– Yeah absolutely. Cloud computing actually is a model for doing business. And in fact, it’s five different models. One of them is the way it’s a model for consuming information technology. And that’s what many people think about, but it’s also an economic model. It’s a model for how you pay for things. And that’s a service model where you pay as you go, pay by the drink, so to speak. There’s also a security model that you have to adopt when you go to cloud computing. You go away from protecting your information with the infrastructure, to a data-centric security model for protecting your information. And that’s because you no longer own the infrastructure that your information is running over. There’s also a different operational model, in that traditionally, when you have a data center, once you turn it on, you dare not turn it off because it may not come back on again, and you run stuff 24/7, but in cloud, the most important aspect is actually to own ON/OFF switches, I like to say because you need to turn off your consumption of IT when you’re not using it. And finally, it’s a completely different acquisition model. You go from buying things, on buying hours, or you go from this capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model, where you are buying something by a specific metric. Like you buy compute by the hour, you buy software about a number of people. So it’s completely different acquisition models as well.
-It makes sense. So I have to imagine that the whole industry right now is sort of seeing a lot of acceleration and evolution and being embraced more broadly with everything that’s going on in the world, right? I mean, there’s a much greater need for sort of remote services and a lot less of a hands-on approach. What kind of progress are you seeing here this year with everything that’s going?
– Well, actually, it’s really digital transformation. I mean, that’s enabled by the broad adoption of cloud computing. Everyone over the past few years recognizes that there’s many ways of consuming IT. Cloud is just one of them that includes managed service providers or even your own data center. So you need to be able to leverage these different methods, these different models to enable new and unique business model.
– Got it. I know another specialization of yours, and a big topic that you talk about is 5G. Where does that start to come into play here? Is that just about really giving us the speed and the bandwidth we need to be able to take us to the next level?
– Well, it does give you more bandwidth and more speed, but that’s basically a superficial view of 5G. It also allows many more devices to be connected to an antenna, but even more important analogy to take these IET services and sort of let them break free so to speak from the data center, your compute can actually be changed, transmitted sort of taken out of the data center and to a local point that’s near where you are actually consuming. It could be your manufacturing floor. It could be your car. Your storage it basically is trying to port it from the data center to that location. This is where you refer to now as Edge computing. 5G networking enables that edge compute. It also enables much more rapid access compute, the ability to process information much faster local to you. So you’ll get that responsiveness and interaction and context. So 5G, because of these capabilities, it requires you to rethink and redesign your application as well.
– Yeah, I think 5G is something that a lot of people are still trying to wrap their heads around. So I appreciate that explanation. That makes a lot of sense. Are there any maybe examples from your company or peak companies you work with or just companies you’re following of sort of these technologies being applied in interesting or impactful ways that you’ve seen?
– I know you should ask, I mean, the rapid global transition to virtual business operations during the COVID-19 emergency is a huge example. Before COVID-19 yeah, people would use GoToMeeting, people would use virtual meetings and webinars, but the real decisions were only made when people were in physically in the same room together, you’d make a lot of preliminary discussions of illuminary agreements, but you wouldn’t really put your signature on the paper until you press the flesh so to speak. Well, with the COVID-19, we can no longer get in the same room together. We have to avoid that physical contact that doesn’t stop business, but it forced the business to accept the virtual aspects, the digital signatures, meaningful decisions being made over web conferences, and the power of digital infrastructure really came to form.
– Yeah, that’s great. One thing I say often I mean It’s, there’s never a good time for something like this to happen, but we sure are lucky that it’s happening now instead of 20 years ago. Right?
– Yeah.
– I’m much more prepared for it. Switching gears a little bit. I mean, there’s been obviously some big successes, and these technologies are helping a lot. What do you see as sort of maybe the challenges or mistakes that are being made right now that we need to kind of get past in order to really move forward?
– Well, really, you need to recognize that this is really going to be a longterm change across every industry. And this is really evidenced by how many organizations are going to continue a broad and liberal work from home policies. This is not a workaround, we need to invest. We’re all have been forced to invest in these technologies. You now have to invest in the policies and procedures to make remote work and virtual work a reality. We’ve now proven to ourselves that web conferences and remote workers actually deliver equal or better performance at a lower cost. So, embrace this and move forward rapidly.
– Yeah, that’s great, we’re lucky to have these technologies. Do you see like specific ways to sort of navigate… I mean, I think we do know that productivity for working from home is great. I mean, I think people can be just as productive, but they’re certainly are drawbacks, right? Do you see sort of the cloud computing helping solve some of those drawbacks? I mean, just, just in terms of really giving us new ways to stay totally connected with each other and maybe even 5 G coming into play.
– Yeah, absolutely. The drawbacks really come from the fact that humans don’t like change in general. So it’s really forcing, it forces the issue when you have to leverage these networks. The other thing is our policies; our processes have not been designed around this virtual world, things like protecting data, properly classifying data. And I’m talking about more than just the sensitivity of it, but the relationship of data to contracts who actually owns the data, how the changes in law with respect to privacy affects how data can be used, even the permission of how you should use data. I don’t think industry or companies really appreciate the importance of redesigning the data management processes, ’cause this will have major impact on their business models and the way they see the future.
– Yeah, I think the cybersecurity and data privacy are really interesting elements right now because they’re important to people in general. And now we see a lot of companies and individuals moving into this sort of digital space. We’ve got more data, more content, more conversations moving online. And a lot of the time for companies that maybe are not at all accustomed to it. So I think maybe there are these new concerns rising about cybersecurity and protecting this information that they’ve never had to think about before. What do you tell people to sort of instill confidence that this stuff is gonna be secure? And we are at a point where we can be very safe about this.
– One other thing is that there is a failure by many executives to recognize the need for large investment in the implementation of more robust data classification processes and policies and the broad deployment of data rights management technologies to mobile devices. These executives are really not yet convinced that the cost of failing to properly protect data will exceed the value of using this data in securely to deliver business value. So yes, it is not a technical challenge to correct these issues, but it really is a human challenge. It’s a mental challenge we have to overcome.
– It seems like that’s the case with a lot of these things, but-
(Kevin laughs).
– Ready or not, here we are.
– Right.
– So I know it’s hard to even look a month ahead right now with all the uncertainty in the world, obviously. But if you try to maybe look ahead one year, what do you see as maybe the state of cloud computing and the business you’re in? What do you think is gonna change, and what do you think is gonna be sort of the key focuses?
– Well, I really see even more rapid acceleration of digitalization and cross-industry integration. Just look at 5G. I mean, you’re going to be consuming 5G from telecommunications companies that are also delivering you your entertainment. That are also media houses that are creating the entertainment that are also delivering you information to your car as you drive down the road, that are also in your house protecting you against burglars. So this cross-industry integration is being driven by technology and cloud, in fact. So it’s really important from the consumer point of view to recognize this and recognize your own responsibility with respect to protecting your information and understanding the services that you are consuming and what it means to your day to day life. So I see consumers being even more integral in this process. As a result, industries, companies need to really be more focused on how they are interacting with these consumers and be more aggressive with respect to personalization of their products and services.
– Yeah, so as we look at specifically the B2B crown, the big frontier right now is sort of that convergence of personalization and scale, right? So, if you were advising a B2B leader who wants to embrace this, this cloud computing revolution and is keeping those sorts of objectives at the forefront, trying to connect with their audiences in a targeted way, in an interesting, compelling way that breaks through what would you advise?
– Well, first of all, you have to recognize that the broad deployment of automation in just about every business process is critical. And this has to be coupled with data-driven decision making. And those decisions need to be based on scenario-based planning. These scenarios will be molded by your knowledge and understanding of the market segment that you are targeting, so the sales process, the marketing process, and the communication process, as well as the manufacturing processes are really going to be intertwined and automated.
– So switching gears a little bit from the industry a little bit to yourself personally, I wanted to talk a little bit about I don’t know if you’d like to call yourself an influencer or a thought leader, none of the above, but you’re clearly an authority on these topics that you talk about. And I think there’s a lot of people that are interested in kind of getting into that sort of position. So I’d like to talk a little bit about your journey and how you’ve sort of reached this point. Obviously, a lot of it is just the professional journey you followed in the experience you’ve gained, but there certainly needs to be a commitment to sort of the personal brand-building aspect of it. What has sort of been your, or how have you gone about that and got into this point?
– First of all, you have to recognize that you have a career, and your career is linked to an industry. It’s not linked to the specific company that you’re working in. So you have to keep the outward vision across the broader marketplace. And that’s sort of what I was doing. I saw cloud computing as the industrialization of information technology. I felt that it really poised to revolutionize business like the assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry. And it was for the exact same reason. Both are successful because they are able to drive down variability and cost through standardization. And the new business models would be revolutionary and drive global connectivity. So, because I saw myself as part of this industry, this global industry, I studied it because it represented the future of my career. Now there were issues, and in many ways, there may still be issues with respect to cloud computing.
So as I focused on the solutions and delivering solutions to the end customer, I could see there was a virtually unanimous fear of using cloud due to the broad security concerns. Many of these concerns were driven by misunderstanding of the basic cloud computing models, the five different models that I talked about earlier. So, because I always had to answer these questions about, why should someone go to cloud when it’s insecure? Or why should I let someone else run my infrastructure? I became a cybersecurity to me, right? Because I had to once again, studied about how this change affected the industry overall. And my expertise in those two domains, I eventually made me an invaluable asset to companies that wanted to leverage cloud computing into design deployment and operation of new business models. So once again, you had the purpose behind the organization to the use and consumption of the technology services. Now, that entire process today is the sort of lumped together under the digital transformation banner. Yet another handle that gets to put on me with respect to being as me.
– Yeah, so this is such a transformative space. You’re kind of an agent of change. And right now I think with all the changes going on, there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of misinformation, and there’s a lot of people that are looking for answers that they can trust, right? So do you feel maybe there’s like even more of a, not a pressure or a burden, but just more of an impetus to sort of really stay on top of things and sort of adapt to this landscape and be there for people that are really looking for those answers and looking for those sources that have the credibility that they can trust?
– Yeah, absolutely. Change is constant, and change is accelerating. And as an influencer or a subject matter expert, your ability to describe and explain the impact of information technology on business key performance metrics is critical. And when you communicate, you need to use the industries, the nature, ’cause that is what will make you unique. Communication is key. You need to be able to communicate information effectively using written, spoken and visual word, and you have to be able to do that through multiple channels, mass media, including social media, by being able to communicate well in those different forms, across these different channels, your audience will grow rapidly and organically.
– When you think about maybe quality effective influencer partnerships or subject matter expert engagements that you’ve been involved with in the past, what do you see as maybe sort of like the tenants to a successful engagement from both the influencers side and the, and the partners’ side?
– Well, it’s really important to understand or accept this as a relationship, not a short term experience, but a longterm relationship where the influencer is a valued part of not just the marketing team, but the communications team and the sales team. When the sales teams, customer intimacy is reflected through the marketing touchpoint and then delivered synergistically across all of the company’s communications channels. That’s the type of effort that really breaks free of the norm. It’s important for both sides to go into the relationship with an expectation of give and take and learning from each side. Man, it’s important to recognize that there’s me or influencer for their knowledge, their experience, the scale, and the commercial value they bring to the team.
– Yeah, I could not agree more. That’s very well said. And also, I noticed that you’ve managed to organically sneak in the Break Free term a couple of times here into your answers. So extra bonus points for that, for sure. That’s very beautiful. One more question on these topics and this is maybe sort of ridiculous question. You don’t have to really address it too much if you don’t want to, but I’m very curious to know from someone who knows the space, why are 5G towers such a magnet for these conspiracy theories? I just don’t understand what’s going on with it.
– Well, people are afraid of what they don’t know. And it’s very hard to prove a negative, right? How can I prove that that tower doesn’t hurt you? So that’s why these conspiracy theories can just be stated with absolutely no factual support. Unfortunately, we see that every day and on the TV from some of our leaders, and this is why it’s important for us as consumers of information, to do our own research, to understand the difference between reality and false goods. Fake news is a reality. So we need to recognize that reality and really that the sources of information that we receive.
– Exactly well, it all comes back to finding voices you can trust and the rising importance of those people like yourself who’ve proven that you’re worthy of listening to, right?
– Hopefully, (laughs).
– Otherwise, it’s been fantastic talking to you, Kevin, just a very bright guy with a lot of great information here. That’s really important with what’s going on in the world right now. If people are interested in getting in touch with you, how would you recommend they go about doing that?
– I’m on LinkedIn, Kevin L. Jackson, or on Twitter @Kevin_Jackson. And if you remember my name, you can remember my email address, which is kevin@kevinljackson.com.
– That’s all very easy to remember. That’s great.
– So breaking it all down, summarizing sort of the conversation here as it applies to the B2B frontier, what was sort of be your top piece of advice to B2B leaders here at Break Free and really take advantage of cloud computing and move forward here with gusto.
– As I said, from the beginning, you operate in a global and interconnected industry, realize that you contribute most to your industry when you build and contribute to that global network, you really break free through collaboration and open dialogue with your colleagues and partners. Keep that in mind.
– Awesome. Thank you so much for chatting with us today. Kevin Jackson, make sure to check him out, check out GlobalNet, check out SourceConnecte, and make sure to get in Kevin. If you’re interested in hearing a little more of his insights, obviously just a fountain of knowledge. So Kevin, thank you so much for joining us here today on Break Free.
Thank you.
All right. We will see you guys next time and take care.