Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Strategy Fabric Podcast, where we talk about outcomes rather than technologies, the why as much as the how. I'm Darren Fulwell, your host for today's conversation. And today, I'm joined by someone I, I met at an automation meetup in London and realized we had a common interest in network automation, not just in the tech, but as a catalyst for change. Campbell, do you want to introduce yourself? Hey, Darren.

Thanks very much for having me. And, yeah, Campbell Gregory, founder of CRG Technology, and, yeah, as you said, met at the automation conference, and we've had a few discussions up to date. And I think realizing that there's a a catalyst for change, you know, in the in the way in which automation is done, we found, you know, many commonalities in how that's done. So looking forward to discussing with you and seeing where this goes. So so you've mentioned you've founded your own company basically to to to deliver this, this this different approach.

Do you wanna give us a little bit of a of an origin story there? Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, I've been in the industry probably, you know, 5, 6 years now. I think, a lot of my time was spent, you know, in the reseller space and on the sales side, you know, and seeing where the industry was going, how things were working.

And late start of 2022 decided to find CRG Technology, with the aim of differentiating ourselves, doing things slightly differently. I think, you know, the IT, space and transformation space is enormous. And kind of what I boil down to was this. There's an opportunity for me to kinda use my innovative thinking and forward thinking approach to to be different and to differentiate. And I think what a better time to be starting, you know, business now where we've got a clean slate to build.

And with everything that's going on in the world, you know, with regards to automation, AI, all of that kind of stuff, really exciting time to be building a technology business. And I think, you know, with my background and where it's going, CRG, you know, was founded on the principle of, you know, being the best, but being super innovative, super transparent with our customers, and showing value, you know, ideally from day 1. But as great sales pitch, But but I suppose the the the point with all of this is that you mentioned a couple of times there are that the timing is right as much as anything. I think we've been we've been doing networking more or less the same way in terms of operations for decades, really. And it's time for a bit of of original thinking, I guess.

Right? Yeah. I think it's, you know, it's original thinking, and we we spent the last 12 months really feeling the market out, seeing what's been going on. And I think the big part of my job and my role for the businesses is making sure we're going in the right direction. You know?

And sometimes I do question it, you know, on the plane to to Denver to to the automation conference. I sat next to someone, you know, is on the way to the supercomputing conference, and Wow. I think there were 12, 12 and a half 1000 people attending supercomputing, you know, and I think we had, you know, 350 Yeah. Yeah. Automation forum.

And you gotta go, hang on. You know, are we going in the right direction? But I think, you know, for what what we're doing in terms of being niche and bringing, network automation to the forefront, there's no better time, in my opinion, than now. You know, the timing is right if we look at where the market's going. You know?

And it's it's also a market that whilst it might not be the most exciting market for everyone, the network is a foundation that is not going anywhere anytime soon. And that's really interesting for us because it it gives us a solid foundation. I always I always think of it as as it doesn't matter what technologies a company uses, whether they're in the cloud, whether they're hybrid, whether they're on prem, whether they they they don't deliver any service. They still consume it. And what's the one technology group that that's needed to consume any other technology?

It's it's the network. Right? Well and I think that also brings an element of opportunity for us. You know? So many businesses have gone into charging down the cloud route and, you know, whilst cloud might seem easy and it might be, you know, relatively straightforward to be spinning up these networks, You know, you can spin up a cloud environment, okay, relatively painless.

But, you know, when you start integrating that back into your traditional networking and you start adding on layers of security and segmentation and commonality of tools across cloud and traditional infrastructure, you really start getting into the guts of how complex this can be for organizations. And I think that, again, is opportunity for us where some organizations, not necessarily by choice, they had to adopt cloud, you know, for for various reasons. And there's a a point in the market now where they're kinda looking back at traditional networking, and going, how do we stitch these 2 together? How do we make sure our teams are working, you know, across platforms? Because, cloud networking team and a traditional networking team, in my opinion, should be the same team.

It's the network. You know? And where we put these assets and how we consume them, it it should be a commodity. But right now, it's quite challenging to to consume. Yeah.

It's far from it. Right? And I think and and even even with all the automation and everything, people need the guidance, I guess, to to to take them in the right direction. Now we had a bit of a a a byline on the on the subject for this podcast of of, taking the network from from naughty to nice. What makes a network naughty then, and how do we make it nice?

Well, I think we always know it's a network fault, isn't it, Tara? Like, it just comes back. So, you know, I think, you know, going from naughty to nice, there's so many aspects that we could look at what makes a what makes a network naughty. And, you know, it could be as simple as, you know, availability. You know, it could be any downtime disruptions to the business.

It could be just inconsistency, I think, is a big challenge for some organizations. So I think one of the beauties we found is, you know, networks are naughty because they are complex. They are ever evolving that things are changing. You know? So given half the chance they do, they are led astray.

And I think one of the things of, you know, having an auto network is it is one of those things where if you don't have visibility, if you don't have control, if you aren't putting the process and the people, you know, and the structure around these networks, they can quite quickly scroll. You know? And then it becomes a real challenge for for organizations to to manage them. And I don't think anyone's ever gone into, I've got a nice network because it's it's one of those things where, you have to no one really gets that opportunity to start greenfield and start from scratch and have the perfect network with the perfect team and perfect technology. So it's always ambitious.

It's almost like they there's there are nice bits, right, sometimes when you when you get the chance to refresh them. But, but they may only may only stay nice for so long because they get led astray by the rest of the network. Right? So Well and and that's the thing you mentioned when you get a chance to refresh them. And I've seen, I mean, organizations get a chance to refresh the land, you know, and they go and buy the most amazing Ferrari of the LAN, the campus environment.

And, you know, then the the wider network doesn't really live up to that standard. So it's the the network as a whole, you know, is is challenging to to wrap one's head around and and see where it's going. But, and you do have moments, you know, if you're an infrastructure team and you get, you know, relatively blank check to go and buy a new portion of the network, you you're really excited, but then it starts getting, you know, challenging to integrate that into the wider wider ecosystem. And and I guess, you know, it doesn't matter if you've got one bit that's fantastic and the rest that's a bit chunky. The symptoms of that are are the same as if the whole lot was rubbish.

Right? And that's the thing. I mean, end of the day, we can be the most advanced. We can be the most technical. We can have the most amazing, you know, tool sets and complexity in the back end.

If that user arrives at the office and has poor connectivity or poor experience, the network's rubbish. You know? And this is the challenge is really trying to simplify the network, make it consumable, make it easy. Because at the end of the day, we also live in a world where, you know, I've got 1 gig up, 1 gig down at home. It's a privilege to be living Yeah.

You know, at this level, you know, of networking and to go back into a corporate environment and not have the same experience. I think users now are far more empowered to say than they took, you know, is is not living up to expectations. Yeah. I was gonna say those those expectations are high, aren't they? And and, you know, and given that the network has, you know, literally in a couple of decades has become foundational to all of the other technologies that we deploy.

You you've got that expectation is real and and and needs, you know, we need to be delivering it. Is this as simple as that, I suppose, isn't it? So so what are the first steps? I mean, obviously, if you if your network isn't what you need it to be, how do we how do we go about making it that so? So I think in in my personal approach and kind of what I've seen and and part of, you know, founding the business was we need visibility.

We, and we need a an easy way to kinda get a health check on on the network because the network is is there to be consumed. It's a key piece of infrastructure, but at the end of the day, it doesn't quite attract the same budgets as cloud and, you know, cybersecurity and some of those other budget line items. So what we needed was, you know, a tool to be able to come in and run effortlessly in a customer's environment and give us an indication, or, you know, we talk about network assurance all the time. Sure. What is the network doing?

Because it can be up it can be up a 100% of the time, but is it delivering based on the business goals? Is it delivering as per the design? You know, we can go into a whole long discussion, you know, on its own based on design, delivered intent and, you know, those kind of things. But what we needed was a quick and easy way to go into a customer's environment that we don't know and provide a health check. And I think that's where I spent a lot of time, you know, on the sales side of things, working very closely, you know, with with engineering.

You know, I love kinda getting under the hood of it was 12 o'clock at night and I was making firewall changes and stuff, and I was going, hang on. What's that? Or trying to, you know, understand really what the engineers are doing on a day to day basis to to make changes. Yeah. And I think what I tweaked quite early on in my career was that customers aren't looking, in my opinion, aren't looking for those very shiny, you know, new tools.

They want their network to be functioning. They want it to be secure and they want it to be delivering for the business. And what we were able to do, you know, using IP fabric was, you know, implement it in a customer's environment and had a full understanding, you know, within a matter of days of what was good, what was bad, how we can prioritize resource, you know, what was uber critical. And I think the best thing was to do that manually. It it was just too hard.

You know? And by the time we got around to it, I ended up with, like, screenshots of some random Uh-huh. Poor switch and a dodgy config, and you're going, by the time you've communicated that to the procurement channel, the head of the instructor, whoever you're speaking to, it's gone full circle, and you've received a purchase order to remediate that. This has probably changed. I was gonna say I was gonna say it takes so long.

No. I mean, as a consultant before I was with IP Fabric, I I spent many a month on a on a data center floor or pulling cables through, you know, in a in a in a a dusty old broom cupboard, whatever it was, in order to to to understand what what an existing network would like. Never mind putting new stuff in. And as you say, it takes so long. By the time you get around to it, you know, and and actually publicize it, things will have changed and moved on.

So, you know, that constant, change that and it's and it's not it's not even intentional change a lot of the time. Right? It's it's things stuff happens. Right? And you need to be able to to to sort of keep a grasp of that.

So and then I guess you need, as you go ahead and remediate and transform, you need to be able to track that and understand that and ensure it's consistent and so on. Yeah. Exactly that. And I think, you know, a big part of, you know, the end goal, you know, for us is taking customers on this automation journey. And I think it's it's for us, it's key to break down what that looks like because it's not somewhere you're gonna get to quickly.

I think we kind of come in there. There's there are quick wins. Yeah. But in terms of being able to walk into a customer's environment and say, we're gonna automate this and make it all, you know, perfect within 6 months, 12 months, it's just not it's not gonna happen. So, you know, I think what we've identified is that we can really bring that network assurance side of things and stability and simplicity through using tool sets and through proactive discussions and design led discussions, you know, and things like that.

So what we were able to do is kind of lead with IP fabric, instantly get a good health check, you know, on the network. We can get diagrams, documentation, everything, you know, in a in a very easy and straightforward, and commercially reasonable, you know, way that we can then even without, as a business, throwing huge amounts of resource, you know, at a at a company, we we can quite quickly make a decision where we can send reports to senior management and and give them a, an idea of what a remediation plan looks like. And at the same time, we can be highlighting very low level issues in the network to engineering. So I think that Okay. I think you got a a good breadth there, I mean, of of, of capability because you're saying, right, to to the to the network engineers, right, you've got a bunch of of issues around, I don't know, configuration state of of interfaces or whatever, cabling problems, topology issues, whatever.

But the higher level, you're saying, look. Now, you know, you've got a tool that that that is enabling your your network teams to to give you a higher level of information about the availability of the network, the the that functionality. You've you've already sort of pushed the needle to the right straight away. Right? But then then I suppose beyond that, it's changing the way that people actually continue that operation.

So you mentioned already automation. You know, that that becomes a big part of big part of it, but not all of it. Right? And that's the the thing that that we we talked about before. Yeah.

And I think, I mean, it's we've got the ability to come in, you know, run IP fabric and a very good understanding of the network. And then over time, we can also measure change and report on change because also we don't wanna be mocking our own homework. I think we wanna be partnering with a tool that, you know, whilst we partner very closely with IP fabric, it is it does give us, you know, independence in terms of who is marking our homework. And we've got a common point of what does could look like. So, you know, immediately, you run the report.

You've got your green, amber, reds. You know, as long as we're turning reds to to ambers and ambers to green over a period of time, we can quite quickly show the impact we're having within the network. And I think that plays out really well in terms of longer, more strategic transformation programs. And I think, you know, where I see the benefits, you know, long term is we are genuinely partnering with customers. We're we're not in the sense, we're not selling IP fabric as a product.

We are using IP fabric as a key tool set for CRG. And then if the customer likes it, which 9 times out of 10 they they do, they go, do you mind leading this here? Because it's been extremely helpful. And I think that's where we wanna be leading with software with a service. Yeah.

And the software piece is important, but that service piece to customers is even more important because it's as you're saying, now we can go in there and, you know, we can tell them how good the network is, but how we fix it and how we do all of that as part of our professional services engagement, you know, how we use new features, how we forward planning 2, 3 years in advance. You know, we we can go in and fix a spanning tree issue, you know, in in a week. Yeah. But in in 12 months from now or 24 months from now as a business, we can be positioning a whole redesign of the entire network. And I think that's, you know, that's important for us is that we're seen as trusted advisers in that space.

Yeah. Yeah. And It's it's really interesting because because I I think of it in like, this knowledge pyramid thing, right, of saying, well, look, you've you've got it's great having the data to to to be able to to sort of do the the minutiae, right, to say that that little thing needs fixing, that little thing needs fixing or whatever. But then it's about building, you know, extracting the information from that data, which gives you that that bit more insight, but then really building knowledge about what the network is about and what it's what you're doing with it, by bringing context from other places, by by by bringing the knowledge of the and the experience of yourselves coupled with the the knowledge and experience of the folks that, you know, at the vendor in order to to actually deliver something that's far more valuable than just that raw data as well. I think that that becomes an interesting part of the, part of the process.

Right? Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's important for us to remain independent. It's important for us to to be innovating. And I I've had a customer come to me and say, oh, if only I had the budget to go and buy that vendor, because I really wanted to.

But when it comes down to skills and it comes down to rates of change and it comes down to, you know, the the people and the process we spoke about, it's not that easy to to be doing that. So from our perspective, where we see kind of assurance and orchestration coming to life long term is simplifying the network, getting the network back to a state in which, in my view, we we're trying to leave customers better off and with tool sets to manage their own network because I like sleeping at night. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the key, though, isn't it? Because because and and I know people talk about this idea of simplifying the network. But in reality, a lot of the complexity that we have has to be there in order to deliver the kinds of services we want. We we need cloud.

Therefore, we need to make sure it's part of their network. We need to have flexibility around our WAN, so we need an SD WAN solution. We need you know? So the the complexity that's inherent in having these different networks and stitching them together is almost a necessity, but what we need is is process and and tooling and whatever it is in order to be able to manage that complexity. And that's and that's the trick, I think, here, isn't it?

Yeah. And I think, okay, we we're not shying away from complexity because we we love complexity where it's necessary. But I think we've I've seen customers where, you know, the direction from the top is let's tag an endpoint on the edge and make sure that that translates all the way to the data center, and we can do all this amazing complex stuff. But fundamentally, the design doesn't allow for it. Yeah.

So Yeah. I think that's where in terms of simplicity, we wanna take a step back, look at the entire network as a whole. You know, look where customers have kind of consumed cloud. Look where customers have gone on their SD WAN, now Sassy. Now the whole evolution of what's been happening at these different layers is is challenging.

And not one single vendor's all got it right at the same time. So where you kind of back a vendor, they drop a key piece of that, and all of a sudden, you've got another third party in the middle there, and that ambition to tag something at the edge and let it go all the way to the data center is gone because that piece of technology sits in the middle. Not impossible, you know, by by any means. But But it's but it's training someone else to to know and understand that. It's getting the knowledge again and bit and understanding how they stitch together and all of that, isn't it?

It's, as as as a network person trying to maintain all of that in my head used to give me brain ache, you know, because you you you just cognitive overload of having all of these different technologies, understanding how they're all stitched together and whatever in a in a relatively small environment, you know, even that is is tough. So to be able to do it in some of the some of the bigger enterprises, for example, it's that sounds horrendous. It's it's extremely challenging, and I think that's where, you know, what we what we are trying to achieve with our customers is being extremely transparent. I think we wanna, you know, just kind of let them know where it's gonna hurt. You know, some some of these transformations are possible, but you're gonna have to go through some some areas of change, and that might be people change, technology change, all these various aspects.

But I think what what we're seeing, and again for us in the market, the enterprise space is a great space to plan because, ultimately, you've got the people and the budgets to deliver large transformation. I think when you start tearing down, you know, enterprises to kind of more commercial mid market sized customers, it's, you know, extremely challenging to to stay on top of all of this and stay on top of BAU and stay on top of how you're gonna, you know, see what's going on in your in your network. You've outsourced a portion of your network, which you thought was a good idea. Now you've lost control and visibility. And, you know, quite quickly, you can you can have that naughty network coming back in and people are going, you know, I I remember when I used to be able to jump on the firewall and and implement change within a reasonable period of time.

Now I'm waiting, you know, for someone to acknowledge that and, you know, there's various aspects of how this all comes comes together. So, you know, I think for us, it's getting back to basics. You know, we like complexity where there where there is a need for complexity, but also what we like to do is take a step back and, what are we trying to achieve? How are we gonna do it? There's best of breed technology vendors, you know, all over the place, some with better integrations than others.

Yeah. And I think what we wanna try and do is let the customers take a breath and and not a dig at consultancies, but we've also seen, you know, big nontechnical consultancies come in and say, well, this is the way, you know, go to cloud, go and do all these amazing things. Yeah. But without understanding the underlying complexity of delivering that change, easier said than done sometimes. Yeah.

And and I guess I guess the context, you know, of the the the organization as well. Right? In term in terms of what technologies they've had before, where you know, what that transformation looks like, how you stay on top of that network during the transformation, whatever. You know, you've you've got so many other aspects to to sort of manage and deal with there. Exactly.

Yeah. And I think, again, going back to what IP fabric has allowed us to do through the approach with snapshotting, you know, and the ability to kind of record change, manage change, visualize the change. I think also one of the greatest features, you know, of IP fabric is ultimately we're playing in a database. So Yeah. A lot of these organizations and a lot of these other tools have right capability, and that becomes quite scary when you, you know, are testing and playing around with your network.

You you don't want to negatively impact your network. So what we've been able to do with the intent checks and things like that is ultimately, you know, really get into the guts of what the network is without inflicting any damage, you know, to the production network. And I think that also brings a huge level of confidence, you know, into, engineering. And I think the most feedback I think we've gotten around our approach with IP fabric is that we're we're adding almost another engineer into the mix without bringing a physical person in there, and we we're almost augmenting skills. So someone who again, in these smaller organizations doesn't have a whole team, you know, behind them.

They've got a long list of things to do. They've got BAU to keep up with. And what an amazing place to go and capture a point in time reference and see what it was last week or see what it is today and see what changed. And quite quickly, they see the value because that would have to be, you know, normally tap on the shoulder to another member of the team. Do you mind investigating this?

And and we had it the other day. There was something with a printer plugged in on the one of the floors and the guy phoned me up. He said, I've just used this tool. It's amazing. And I was able to restore what the config was last week based on and all these and all of a sudden, it wasn't necessarily about the complexity of the change because in other ways to achieve that, it was just the simplicity that he could log on to the portal and get his job done faster.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do is complement people, process, and all of that with the best agreed tools, with an API first approach, make life easier where we can because why not? We live in a day and age where we can use these tools. We can do things faster.

I'm learning my way around the Python SDK, but I think it's one of those things where, you know, if I can do it nowadays and and having not been technical, we live in a world where we can introduce a lot of change relatively quickly to complement the way people work. These tools aren't replacing people. They are making people's jobs faster so they can have more strategic discussions about where we take the network in year 2 or 3. Yeah. No.

I think you've, you've you've kind of rounded that off quite nicely in terms of the explaining why automation is not a bad thing. Right? You know, it's not gonna replace people's jobs. You know, we I think we've established that now. So, anyone who thinks it is, you know, think again.

Because, you know, this is called progress. Right? I think that's something that we've been living with. Yeah. Certainly, our generation for, yeah, for long enough.

So I can listen. I could go on talking for hours. I've got so many other questions here that I'm thinking. Yeah. We could do it.

We could take this, way further. But I'm conscious of, of time. So I'm gonna just ask you my final question, Campbell. What's Santa bringing you this year? Normally, I'm getting a lump of coal by this time, but I think it's Oh, here we go.

No. I think from obviously, IP Fabric and and CRG are working extremely closely together. And one of the exciting things we've got is, working towards Cisco Live, and we've got, proof of concepts running with IP Fabric where we can come and install the tool, take you through the whole process. And, you know, I think for us as a business, we we're hoping to spread some of that festive cheer by just enabling people to actually go on holiday because we can go and and see what's going on in the network and capture the network. And you know what?

If I go and run IP fabric in a tool and it brings back all greens, then everyone's getting a pretty happy Christmas. Same That sounds like sounds like a great set of lights for the tree. Right? That's that's what we're bringing. So, you know, from our perspective, looking forward to the partnership, you know, growing these solutions and also just introducing people to the product.

It can be quite overwhelming to run through some of these proof of concepts, but, you know, we we hopefully bringing a new way, you know, of innovating to to our customers, to the market. And if anyone's got any questions or even just wants to see, you know, any aspects of the of the platform, then let's just give us a shout. We're open up until Christmas. So just in time. Love love it.

Love the nice little plug there at the end. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, all your all contact details and everything hopefully will be in the in the notes to accompany this anyway. So, if anyone does wanna speak to you, we'll, we'll pass them through.

Listen, always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. I'm really looking forward to, to catching up in the new year. I know you've got a bit of an extended break hopefully over over this the festive season. So, all the best for that and all the best to your family. And, yeah, have a great, have a great Christmas.

Thanks very much, Darren. Great speaking to you as always. And, yeah, to everyone listening, have a great, festive time, and we'll see you in the new year and building up Cisco live. Looking forward to that as well. Awesome.

Should be fun. Take care.