Ashley Adams:
Hello and welcome to another episode of SolarWinds TechPod. In this episode, we’ll be exploring the world of channel. When we say channel, think partner. We’re joined by a SolarWinds’ longtime elite partner, SHI. I’m your host, Ashley Adams. Joined by fellow host, Sean Sebring. Hey, Sean.
Sean Sebring:
Howdy, Ashley. Excited for our topic today. Representing SHI is our guest for this episode, Aldo Masoni. Aldo, can you introduce yourself?
Aldo Masoni:
Sure. So, Aldo Masoni, gosh, I have 25, we’ll say more than 20 years of industry experience. I think they said, once you get over 20, you just say 20 plus years of experience. I’ve worked at multiple VARs, a couple manufacturers over my time in the industry and, really, have had a lot of leadership roles, plenty of roles from deployment, implementation, design, architecture. Currently have a role as a observability practice lead at SHI so I think that’s what brings us here today.
Ashley Adams:
That’s fantastic. Thank you and we’re really thrilled to have you with us, Aldo. So, to get us started, I think a great kickoff is you already mentioned an acronym, VAR. What does that mean? Can you educate our listeners and just talk to us a little bit about what is channel, how does that relationship work in the IT industry?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, so I guess depending on what perspective you’re looking at it. So, from a VAR perspective, so someone like us at SHI, we resell a lot of products and so we partner with manufacturers such as SolarWinds and that’s where the partnership or relationship comes in from that perspective or the channel side of the house. And then the flip side is us working with our customers. So, jointly, we have the same customer that we’re working to support their needs or giving them the right solution based on their challenges.
But so, yeah, from a partner perspective, it’s the channel side and, from a relationship partnership perspective for the customers, that’s the customer side of the house and that’s where the value added partnership comes from.
Sean Sebring:
And so, that’s a VAR, right? Value added resource?
Aldo Masoni:
Value added reseller, yeah. So, we’re reselling SolarWinds to our end customer.
Sean Sebring:
Reselling. Oh, yeah. I was asking for the customers, I totally knew what that meant.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah. And when you think about it, it’s not just products that we sell, it’s services, implementation services, consulting, we can do assessments, whatever the customer needs. Value added can mean many different things.
Ashley Adams:
So, thinking about your experience on the side of SHI working with SolarWinds, for example, how do you see that relationship between the partner and the business and maybe who are some of the key contacts or stakeholders that you work with on a regular basis?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, so it’s pretty interesting. So, in my role where I’m the practice lead, so I almost have two jobs, if you will, where I’m interacting with the channel which is the channel side of the SolarWinds business and it’s almost like I’m the channel side of SHI and we work to educate, basically, each other. So, I help educate SolarWinds’ sellers and the channel team about SHI’s capabilities and why should we partner together. Again, what value can we bring, not only to SolarWinds, but what value can we bring to our joint customers.
And on the flip side of that, I also work with the field team. So, our field sellers, both, again, SolarWinds and SHI field sellers, to help, whether it’s enable them from an educational perspective, understanding the technology space, so what is observability, or the specific solutions that SolarWinds can offer and how does that meet the customer needs. So, it’s multifaceted from my role perspective but we have engineers on the team that can really dig in from a technical perspective and understand jointly customer needs, priorities, what features and capabilities do they need.
And so, that’s how, I think, both from a SHI partnership perspective and SolarWinds, we help educate our customers together in driving what’s the best solution for them.
Ashley Adams:
Well, that makes a lot of sense. How much would you say of your job is spent understanding the customer pain points? How much are you interfacing with the end customer these days?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, I’d probably say it’s 50/50 because a lot of time is spent working on the channel side and making sure I understand what SolarWinds can offer our customers. And then, on the flip side, it’s working with our customers to see what their challenges and pain points are and helping bring the two together.
Sean Sebring:
So, I’m going to play ignorant, which I do very well on our TechPod here, not just because I am, but for our audience of course. So, we’ve talked a lot about what value you’re trying to bring working with SolarWinds, working with your customers, I’m going to ask a challenging question which I know you’ll be able to answer. Why would a customer rely on channel instead of going direct to the sellers of the software themselves? Can you really paint that picture of the value you bring to the customer?
Aldo Masoni:
SHI, we partner with 10,000 plus different solutions and manufacturers and so, basically, our conversation with our customer is to solve whatever challenge they have and each customer might be a little bit different. And so, when we look at it from a solution perspective and not necessarily a product perspective, what solution is going to solve their challenge or their problem. So, it’s more about having a conversation with the customer, understanding, again, what are their pain points, what are they trying to get out of this solution or what is this challenge.
So, we’re trying to solve that challenge. Just what every engineer loves to do, which is solve challenges, but how are we going to solve that challenge, what is the right tool or, in this case, I feel what is the right platform to solve that challenge. And I think that’s one of the things where, in this observability space, a lot of the current manufacturers are all evolving.
So, for me, it’s actually very interesting because, like I said, I’m learning all the time what capabilities all the different players in the space have and, obviously, SolarWinds has been in the space a very long time and their solution is evolving very well to meet customer’s needs. So, yeah, it’s fun. I don’t know if that answered the question.
Sean Sebring:
No, it totally does and it puts us both in a winning position because you get to represent the customer from an unbiased, even if you do know what you feel is the strongest solution, which could be a SolarWinds tool or something else, it’s just in our favor that, hey, we happen to recommend SolarWinds for a lot of this stuff. And I do want to, if we get that chance, I’m sure we will expand on the observability platform. But yeah, it’s being experts with tons of tools you can recommend at your disposal, tons of other customers that you can reference at your disposal.
So, it’s just good to know what that channel is and having that unbiased representative there trying to solve your problems. And I hear you loud and clear on the solutioning side of things, that’s what keeps me going.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s exciting too especially when we can come up with a solution to a challenging problem. And like I said, from a SHI perspective, it’s not just selling a product. It’s their services engaged that needs help for observability, building the right dashboards or the right KPIs or understanding what the customer’s specific challenge is and figuring that out.
Ashley Adams:
And that leads me to what I wanted to ask next which is what are some of the trends in major customer problems or pain points that you’re seeing today. And you already touched a little bit on, I think we see in the market people not quite as interested in a one point product to fix one specific problem but the greater solution sell. So, yeah, could you expand on that for us a little bit?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, yeah. So, definitely, a lot of conversations happening from a tool sprawl perspective, I’ve got too many tools, and observability is not much different than your traditional security conversation which is I’ve got a lot of niche tools that are looking at something specific but now that’s evolved and it’s grown and now I need 10, 20 tools to look at my entire environment or I need 10, 20 people to manage all these different tools in my environment. So, if I can consolidate my tools and get that, I’ll say it, I think we all know it doesn’t really exist but, that single pane of glass, that’s where everyone wants to get to. So, if I can minimize my tools, if I can go down from 20 tools to, say, three tools, that’s pretty good.
So, there’s cost savings there from a manpower perspective, cost savings from a renewals perspective and then everyone’s working towards the same objective, we’re looking at the same dashboard. So, you’re looking at the same type of data or the same language, everyone understands, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking in SolarWinds and I’m looking at this dashboard, I’m looking at the MPM module, I understand what’s going on, I understand what this guy’s talking about.” So, then, when you get into those troubleshooting situations, you’re not finger pointing because one person says, “Oh, I looked in this tool and it says this,” and somebody else looked in a different tool and it says, “No, that’s not what it’s say.”
So, if everyone’s using the same tool, all the data says the same thing, it makes the teams work better together. And, of course, if everyone works better together then you don’t have finger pointing and fighting and everyone lives harmoniously.
Sean Sebring:
Music to my ears, yeah. Consolidating tools and breaking down silos, I love all these concepts. So, this is going to be a spin on it because, when we’re talking about consolidating to more of that platform approach where we’re all using the same platform, same tool, it’s harder to narrow down which persona you’re talking to if everybody from different spaces is using it. So, just from an observability standpoint, which, again, we haven’t really tapped into yet, but who are your personas when you’re talking to folks about observability platforms?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, and it’s very interesting and that’s a great point because it obviously depends on who you’re talking to, on what their goals are, what their outcomes are, what do they want this tool to do. And again, to me, that’s why this is exciting because, in observability platform, a SolarWinds solution can do so many different things so it can be a lot to everybody. So, your VP of IT, maybe he doesn’t want the down and dirty, he doesn’t care about server utilization, disc utilization but he does care about overall performance and they can set dashboards to measure TPIs and SLOs and that’s how the businesses get measured. So, the business owners care about that overall performance and uptime.
Or you dig down a little bit deeper and maybe you’ve got the network engineer who cares more about connectivity or latency between my WAN length so the platforms can do that. Or if you’re talking to an application developer or something, how’s my app performing, is there latency talking to the database, where is my latency because that’s what they most care about is from that perspective so, yeah.
So, the cool thing is, depending on who you’re talking to, they’re going to have different wants and needs and, if you’ve got the right solution, the right platform, it can do all these things. And that’s when you bring it all together from a, say, event correlation perspective. So, I’m ingesting all this data from all these different points, from the network, from the application flows, even from the security side of the house, connectivity, so I can see all these different things, when a problem occurs, you can more quickly pinpoint that solution.
So, you’ve got tool that can ingest all kinds of data, what’s the data that you want to see, how do you want to see it and then, again, the persona, it’s the data and how do I want to see it and you can slice it up any way based on who’s got what need.
Sean Sebring:
So, you got network, you got apps, you got servers. So, with all these different folks involved or all these different teams, being on the same tool, what I like about it, and I’m going to give you a position to talk about what is observability versus just your traditional monitoring in a second because I want to hear everyone’s individual interpretation of what it means because everyone’s got a little bit of a different take on it almost. But I’m going to ask what would you say is one of the best starting points?
If I’ve got network that contributes to the health of a service database, I’ve got the server utilization, all sorts of different things to look at, is there any one area, any specific part of what makes a service that you start with first or do you try and get a few of the teams on board to say we need to be checking the networking, we need to be checking the website, all of these different things at once or do you really just start with one? What would that one be if it is one?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I would probably prefer to start on either the Cloud or application side. Cloud is more complex, that’s where a lot of organizations are hosting. And when I say Cloud, I’m not just saying AWS or GCP, not one. Typically, everyone’s in multi-Cloud today and, typically, everyone’s got a hybrid environment so they’ve got something in the Cloud and something on the ground. And so, that would be the best place to start but, typically, just based on traditional business, a lot of the relationships that we have anyways from an SHI perspective, it’s usually on the networking side.
So, that’s usually where a lot of the conversations start. But once we start talking about the advantages of the platform and the tools and being able to correlate different events, that’s when people understand, okay, this isn’t just about looking at network connectivity or my switches and my routers, this is about application flows, this is about individual devices or even when we talk about Cloud and you can look at microservices and stuff spinning up and down. So, you get all the players involved across the board, that’s when you have the best conversations because then you’re connecting the dots there.
Ashley Adams:
I think something that I’ve noticed even from my side, on product marketing, is getting that message across the different departments in which you just mentioned. And what does that involve maybe from the channel side when you have to … Who’s the one making the final business decision? It’s at a level typically higher than maybe somebody who’s actually running the product itself like a network or system admin, would you say that’s correct?
Aldo Masoni:
Oh, yeah, 100%. It’s typically going to be VP of IT or even executive level depending on how large the organization is. But typically, you are having to talk to and get buy-in from the managers and even some director levels but typically your VP and above that are the decision makers.
Sean Sebring:
So, we’ve danced around it and there’s been a ton of context clues based off of the questions we’ve asked and how you’ve answered. But can you help us with your best definition on the fly here, I put you on the spot. How would you describe observability versus your traditional just monitoring?
Aldo Masoni:
When I started this journey in this role, that was my first task, is defining what does observability mean. I spent quite a bit of time of looking. All the different players in this space, how do they define observability, what does it mean to them, look on the Wikipedia definition and all this stuff. And it’s, okay, everything is a little bit skewed towards where that particular manufacturer started or came from, where their strengths are. At SHI basically, me and my team, we created our own definition of what observability is and, really, we shortened it down to it’s having the visibility from an end-to-end perspective.
So, whether that’s from the end user perspective all the way through, if you think about the flow of an application or the transaction flow, all the way through the network and connectivity, whether it’s on Cloud or in a private data center, getting into that front-end web server, into that backend database and all the way back. So, it’s having end-to-end full stack visibility from that whole application flow or transaction flow.
Sean Sebring:
I hear the word health of a service, the term, I guess, comes up a lot which I appreciate because it helps break down those silos to me instead of saying this is your fault, your problem, we can identify the source of a degraded service but it’s looking at it as a service now. I’m an ITIL buff so, when we talk about a service, a service is comprised of many different things and it felt so ephemeral and intangible because it’s, yeah, but there’s so many different little pieces that make up a service.
With observability and the tools for observing the health of these services, it’s making it tangible now. I can look at a service and see its network components, its server application, I can see all of those and they’re actually represented digitally as a healthy or not healthy service and I really like that. And so, it’s giving life to them as services, you can look at them instead of just as an entity but a service comprised of many entities.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, 100%. And if you think about what’s important from a health perspective, from an application perspective and you have your application dependency mappings, it has become very important in understanding these different connection points and the health of the services dependent on those connections and the latency between those connection points and that’s really what determines, primarily, the health of that application. Is everything else performing as expected, whether it’s from a connectivity perspective, response perspective, whatever it may be. So, yeah, so breaking down and being able to have that visibility at the service level is good.
Sean Sebring:
You used a buzzword that we have on the ITSM side, dependency mapping, which plays into CMDB, configuration management database. The way that observability and these newer tools work, to me, is not necessarily replacing but evolving what CMDB was previously thought to do. Which is I have, in a spreadsheet, a row in a column that represents a configuration item which is something that contributes to a service. Whereas, now, with stuff like observability tools, you can look at the service and see, node-based even, what are the dependencies, what are the configuration items that are building this service.
The tool is doing all that for you and it’s in such a way that it’s visually represented, it’s not just dependency mapped from I said this is dependent on that but they’re building the service for you to look at and see its health and drill down. And it’s got the live statistics, the data, the metrics around it now while you’re looking at it. So, to me, these observability technologies are evolving what was previously done with CMDB which was a little bit close to just a spreadsheet in a lot of ways of saying here’s all our potential services and the configuration items that make them, it’s taking that just so much further.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree, especially when you can dynamically build these tables and the dependency mappings because that’s been a challenge. Just like you said, whether we’re using manual Visio diagrams or manual spreadsheets to maintain things from a connectivity perspective and then somebody goes and changes something and then everything’s out of date. So, if you can dynamically map these constantly on a regular basis, that’s amazing and that’s what these newer platforms can do.
Ashley Adams:
Speaking of newer platforms and continuous industry buzzwords, AIOps, anomaly detection, all things that I think people are very excited to implement as well. How much are you hearing from customers that that’s important to them when they’re implementing a solution these days?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah. So, for me, what’s interesting is I think that’s where everyone wants to go, not only from an industry perspective, but our end customers. But what does that really mean? To everyone, it means something different, again, just like observability means something different to everybody and can your organization really take advantage of AIOps or automation which is where it’s going. So, you’ve got your tools like SolarWinds leverages AIOps to better define or understand what’s happening in an environment whether it’s setting that baseline, what is normal. And then there’s the other sides of AIOps which is, again, the integration tool an automation tool and what is that doing.
But I think a lot of it comes down to baselining and what is normal and then what has changed from that what is considered a normal state. And I think that’s the advantage of the newer systems, the new observability systems leveraging AIOps to understand what that is. Setting that baseline, setting what normal means and, again, that could be variations, up or down, as opposed to somebody manually setting those thresholds. Again, the difference between observability and monitoring, old school monitoring, is standard threshold, hard thresholds that were set manually by somebody. Where leveraging AIOps, the new observability tools, those are all dynamically set and set over time.
Ashley Adams:
Yes, that’s fantastic. And I think what we hear from the customer base is that reduced alert fatigue that comes with that. Because you can set up a million alerts but just depending on which are the ones that you really want to look into, what are critical. I know, on several TechPods, Sean has mentioned it’s the IT guys who get called at 2:00 a.m. in the middle of the night on a Saturday, is it something I got to get up for or can we let this one pass? So, impact to end users lives as well.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, there’s a certain ringtone I have PTSD. If someone’s at an airport and I hear that ringtone, it brings me back to my on-call days and, ugh, it’s impactful.
Aldo Masoni:
Everyone has alert fatigue because you’ve got alerts that are false alarms or you’ve got the same alert going time and time again and you need that alert suppressed, alert suppression and then you’ve got, now, it’s intelligent alerting. So, it’s, again, looking at that correlating alerts and understanding, okay, I’m getting five alerts from five different devices but they’re all stemming from this one primary alert so I can suppress all these other alerts because I know this one is really the cause so being able to focus in on that. So, yeah, that’s definitely one of the benefits of a good, new, solid observability platform.
Ashley Adams:
Very cool. Now, we are interested to pivot a little bit about what it’s like to sell into a Fed or SLED market as compared to commercial. What are some of the challenges or pain points that you’re seeing from that side of the house and maybe what’s more important to them as they might not be as future forward looking into capabilities like AIOps. But what are some standards that they’re looking for in solutions today?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah. Again, from my perspective, national lead across the US, we support all different business segments so I get it from all different customers, different customer perspective and what’s important to them. Typically, the enterprises are able to be a little more agile, a little more flexible as far as their spending because this is a more immediate need. There’s an immediate business impact because this application isn’t working so I need better visibility into that, how can we better understand or solve for this lack of visibility.
When we’re talking about public sector, government, it’s obviously a little bit slower because they want to make sure things are more secure, they’re more tried and true, something’s been around in the field a lot longer, has to meet more security requirements maybe FedRAMP or something like that. So, yeah, there’s typically a little more homework involved, making sure it meets all these different requirements and then, obviously, the budget cycles are set. So, if you don’t get tenure, you don’t have the conversation at the right point in time, you may be waiting a whole year before you get that solution sold and in place so I’d say extended sales cycles is definitely one of the big ones.
But you’re doing all the same stuff, you’re going through all the same steps and having the customer conversation and understanding what do they really want to get out of this tool, what do they need from this tool or from the platform and they need to see it and they need to understand it. So, you go through your demos and your POCs to validate that the features and capabilities of the tool that you’re recommending fits the needs of the customer. So, all that process is still the same, it’s just more around the sales cycle and the adoption, how quickly they might adopt some new technology.
Sean Sebring:
I work with both sides as well, supporting my sellers who are both for private sector and commercial. In the private sector, government, SLED, Fed, they’re almost always working with an SHI, a reseller of some kind. Is it, again, just because you’re able to give more of a agnostic view of tools, is it because it’s another layer of vetted, this person’s … We have SHI to help hold accountable if the solution is not correct. Why do you see that the government space or private sector relies more on partners than the commercial?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, I think it’s all of that, everything that you just said. So, it’s a valued partnership, really, where we can bring our recommendations to them based on our experience. We’re exposed to a lot more than they are, we have a lot more time to learn about these solutions than they do so that’s part of that education process, so we’re bringing that to them. And at SHI, we’ve developed a workshop to basically go through this deep dive discovery and questionnaire of what’s most important to you, what are the pain points, maybe what tools are you using today and what do you like about these tools and probably, more importantly, what don’t you like about them, what don’t they do.
And so, having those conversations and really understanding, from the customer’s perspective, what their goals and objectives are, what their pain points are, that helps lead us towards the right solution. And again, since we’re exposed to a lot more, we can narrow that down and say, “Hey, here’s a top one or two that we recommend based off your specific needs and based off the different solutions that are out there and then let’s quickly go into a demo and POC.”
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, just based off of that, it sounds like anybody would benefit just as much from a reseller. You don’t have to be government, Fed, SLED, you’re experts in the space of research and tool identification so that’s good, that’s good to hear.
Ashley Adams:
Aldo, we’d love to hear a little bit about how you feel on buying trends in the market today, talking about perpetual versus subscription, people interested in moving to SaaS models. One analogy that’s commonly used to get that to settle into people’s heads is, if you can remember the old days where we used to go to Blockbuster or a video store and you had to physically rent your VHS or DVD, that was a one-time purchase for that rental period but now we’ve moved to the world of Netflix and all the amazing streaming platforms out there, you get a monthly subscription for everything all in one.
So, I know that translates to the tech world a little bit in terms of buying practices. What are you seeing out there today?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, that’s a great analogy, for sure, yeah. And I think something that SolarWinds did, gosh, I want to say it was at the end of last year. So, with the new HCO, hybrid Cloud observability offering, they went with a subscription model and typically you’re getting an annual or a three-year subscription which typically works out best from a pricing perspective. But going to that model, it’s been around for a while as opposed to a perpetual licensing where you’re buying that one-time cost but you’re getting limited featured so, from a traditional SolarWinds perspective, you’re paying for each module.
So, NPM module or the APM module, whatever it may be, you’re paying for each one of those individually as opposed to, with the HCO subscription model, then you’ve got an annual cost and you’re getting all these features and you’re actually getting additional features which, one, it makes it easier to consume those features and capabilities so you can maybe play around with something that you wouldn’t have thought of purchasing before.
And just overall, I think it’s a better licensing model because you have pure SKUs you have to worry about when it comes to renewals. It says, okay, I’m renewing this one SKU and it includes all the features that I need as opposed to going through a laundry list of items. So, yeah, I think it’s a great model and I think it just makes life easier all around.
Sean Sebring:
You brought up a good point and I love this. One of my previous leaders was always saying the phrase or just calling out two things, scalability and sustainability. And having SaaS is you don’t have to stress about sustaining it. And the scalability, like you just mentioned, I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
So, when you’re getting all those features, let’s say that we have an initial project to launch, just a piece of the feature set, that’s the immediate ask but, after we’re getting momentum, we’re past that, I have all these other features that now I can start scaling into as my organization is able and I don’t have to worry about the cost creep as much because I’m not looking at a whole new tool. Working with my ITSM customers, it’s the same concept. If they just want basic ticketing, cool, you got basic ticketing. But if you wanted to start expanding into using the change feature, the problem asset discovery, they’re there if you want them. You get it even if you’re not using it.
And so, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it and I think SaaS definitely does a lot. Just like you didn’t know you wanted to watch that one weird show on Hulu that came up next, I had it and didn’t know I needed it but, all of a sudden, it’s on and now I’m like, “Oh, that was a really good movie.”
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, and now you’re binge-watching a series you had no idea about.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah.
Ashley Adams:
Yeah. We had a great customer success story just recently of that very scenario where they were using one part of the functionality and, it brings us back to the beginning of the conversation, we’re able to really utilize the benefits of tools consolidation because, as they realized that they hadn’t deployed these other features and functionalities, that they could offload some legacy tools that nobody was keeping up with or using and have them all in one place, one single source of truth. So, no, that’s super cool.
Sean Sebring:
I think it’s also cool when we think about hosted SaaS solutions. Like Aldo, you guys are experts at discovery research for tools and things like that. When you’re using a tool that’s SaaS and hosted by a provider, you don’t have to be experts at hosting your tool, you don’t have to be experts at managing your tool, that’s what the hosting is for, that’s part of the value that you’re getting. So, leave it to the experts, which is the ones who built and are hosting the tool, to improve, design and manage the sustainability of that platform.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone’s always traditionally run into issues from a resource perspective. You’re building the server to manage your environment, you really just want to focus on managing your environment, not managing the resources. So, yeah, that’s what a SaaS platform helps out with.
Ashley Adams:
Maybe to wrap us out, you can talk to us just about the relationship that SHI and SolarWinds has had over the past however many years. Remind me what it is now.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah. Actually, I had done a presentation to the SolarWinds team a while ago and I was actually pretty surprised to find out SolarWinds and SHI have been a partner for more than 20 years and I think SolarWinds has only been around for what, 24, 25-ish years. SHI has been around for over 30 years so we’ve been around for a long time, we’re a $14 billion company now but, back in the day, we started off as a $1 million company. So, both organizations have grown exponentially since then but it’s cool that we’ve had this longstanding partnership and relationship and we’ve both grown, both evolved.
So, yeah, it’s pretty cool and interesting. And like you mentioned early on too, we’re an elite partner so we’re the highest level partner and I think, since SolarWinds has really expanded their partnership program, I think, last year, I was actually fortunate enough to go receive our awards at the last partner summit which we received four awards, I will brag, which is pretty cool. I don’t remember all the awards but I know that big one being the partner of the year so that was pretty cool.
Ashley Adams:
That’s awesome. I love to hear that and we certainly know we can’t do it without the support of amazing resellers like yourself.
Sean Sebring:
Well, just too many awards to count, I couldn’t keep up.
Ashley Adams:
All right, Aldo. Well, we like to have a little bit of fun with our guests and ask a few rapid fire questions just to get to know you and your personality a little bit more. We’re going to start with, if you could travel to the past or the future, which one would you be choosing?
Aldo Masoni:
Future, for sure.
Sean Sebring:
Awesome, good. I feel like people who want to travel to the future have a different outlook than people to the past and I really appreciate it. I’m myself a past guy, I’m like, “Oh, let me go to the past. I’ve seen Back to the Future, let me play that. Farmer’s Almanac, let me win some money.” But someone out there just like you, you’re a researcher, you got to get out in the future and see what’s going on so that’s cool.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, I feel like … I don’t feel, I know I’m an optimist so I just think what’s ahead and what’s out there is cool. Little curious.
Sean Sebring:
See if the aliens took over earth in 20 years or something.
Aldo Masoni:
Right or if we get along.
Sean Sebring:
Speaking of, and not a follow-up but still on the same sci-fi-ish topic, if there was a city in space that you could just go live at for some time, would you go live at a city in space?
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, I probably would.
Ashley Adams:
So far we’re two for two on the same answers, Aldo.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah. Ashley, yours has a caveat that it had to be finite, right?
Ashley Adams:
That’s true, yes. I was like, “I’m not signing up for a forever space experiment,” but it’s like, “Oh, you get to check this out for” … I would say anything under six months, I could be okay with that.
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, I think we … I can’t remember. Me and my family were driving somewhere and that question came up and I think it was because there was a recent trip out to space. And it was, yeah, if you have to go and you can’t come back, probably not doing that. But if you get to come back, yeah, definitely.
Ashley Adams:
There you go. What is your favorite tech invention?
Aldo Masoni:
Tech invention, tech invention. I really don’t consider myself a techie. I’ve got a lot of friends that they consider themselves techie, they’ve got so many toys, whatever comes up. I’d almost say I’m old school. So, I’m a car guy so I enjoy cars. So, I don’t even know if you’d consider that tech but I enjoy cars a lot.
Sean Sebring:
How about the wheel? There you go, there’s wheels on a car.
Aldo Masoni:
I used to have a ’68 Mustang and I’m in the market to buy another one because I sold it about 15 years ago. My grandfather on my mom’s side was born in 1904, he’s since passed but he was 104 when he passed. I was like, “Just imagine all the things that he’s seen in his lifetime, just the car and how cars or automobiles have evolved. They’re still around but they’ve evolved.” So, I still consider that to be a tech thing because it’s ever evolving and gone from very mechanical to, now, very electronic or digitized.
Ashley Adams:
No, I think that’s a fantastic answer. I got to know, what color was the Mustang?
Aldo Masoni:
Blue, actually. So, I had a friend that was a painter and we created a custom blue color. I like royal blue, it’s my favorite color and we did a Mitsubishi blue with a pearl in it and so it came cool.
Sean Sebring:
Very nice. Very jealous, and very nice. I’m going to steal one of Ashley’s questions because I really like this one, I’m glad she added it. But if you could pick any talent in the world to just give yourself, what would that talent be? What talent would you most like to have?
Aldo Masoni:
The ability to play a musical instrument. I am so not musically inclined at all, it’s horrible. A guitar or piano, probably guitar, I think that’s cool when people can play guitar, yeah.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, you can carry it with you. If you can carry a piano with you, that’d be pretty cool too but …
Aldo Masoni:
Yeah, yeah. A little organ.
Ashley Adams:
I also wish I possess that ability but, you know what they say, it’s never too late to start, right?
Aldo Masoni:
That’s true, that’s true.
Ashley Adams:
Maybe we’ll end it with the last one as what do you consider your greatest achievement?
Aldo Masoni:
Oh, gosh, that’s a hard one. I’m old so I’ve done a lot of things. This is a really hard one. I think my family. Just raising a successful family. I have two daughters and, just recently, had my second grandson. So, I’ve got two grandsons, still married. So, I think all of that stuff’s pretty cool so maybe that.
Ashley Adams:
Very admirable and congratulations.
Sean Sebring:
Nothing wrong with a good wholesome answer like that, Aldo.
Ashley Adams:
That’s right. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, it was a very enlightening conversation. Aldo, thanks for hopping on with us.
Aldo Masoni:
Cool, glad to be here. Appreciate you guys inviting me.
Ashley Adams:
And thank you listeners for joining us on another episode of the SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Ashley Adams, joined by fellow host Sean Sebring. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 4:
All right, let’s see what this puppy can do.
Speaker 5:
Computer.
Computer:
Hello, user.
Speaker 5:
Computer, I want to listen to a new podcast.
Computer:
Compiling. There are over 3 million podcasts.
Speaker 5:
Ooh, okay. I want a podcast that talks about technology.
Computer:
Filtering. There are approximately 90,000 podcasts about technology.
Speaker 5:
All right, all right, getting there. A podcast about technology in movies and TV shows.
Computer:
Filtering. There are over 500 podcasts featuring technology in movies and TV shows.
Speaker 5:
A podcast about technology and movies and TV shows, has one host who knows a lot about technology and one that knows nothing. Oh, and it’s got to be funny.
Computer:
Filtering. According to my search, there is only one.
Speaker 5:
Excellent. Computer, play.
Speaker 7:
We’re in.
Speaker 8:
I’m going to reroute the ThermoDrive.
Speaker 9:
Electronic mail failure.
Speaker 10:
Stored forever in a virtual library.
Speaker 11:
Computers can’t swim.
Speaker 10:
They can now.
Speaker 11:
They’re data termites.
Speaker 12:
The website, it’s alive.
Speaker 13:
Movies-
Speaker 14:
And?
Speaker 13:
Mainframes.
Speaker 5:
Download Movies and Mainframes wherever you get your podcasts.
