The Future of Enterprise IT with Kurmi Software CEO, Micah Singer

In this Microsoft Teams Insider Podcast episode, Micah Singer, CEO of Kurmi Software, and Tom Arbuthnot discuss a range of topics around the future of Enterprise IT:

• potential impact of generative AI on software development
• shift towards remote work and how it's driving demand for more IT infrastructure
• role of AI in IT security
• the rise of low-code and no-code applications
• monetisation of cloud infrastructure
• the need for greater automation in IT management

Transcript

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Tom Arbuthnot 0:00

Welcome to the team's insider podcast. Good one coming up for you here. As we come to the end of 2023, I spent some time with Micah Singer, who's CEO of Kermi Software and has a really interesting background in the industry. rather than doing the whole product pitch thing, we actually got into where we see this space going. The telecoms, the IT space, the cloud technology space. Really interesting conversations, some predictions. We'll see if those come true. I just want to say thanks to Komi for their support of the community work at Empowering Cloud as well. On with the show. Hey everybody, Looking forward to this one. Bit of a different topic this time, so I'm excited to get into this. just want to introduce yourself and give us a bit of background?

Micah Singer 0:40

Absolutely. My name is Micah Singer. I am the CEO of Kurmi Software. We're a service management provider to large enterprise and MSPs. I've spent about, I guess it's getting on towards 25 years in the telecom in collaboration industry and often times small startups. So really excited to always have these conversations about technology and its evolution.

Tom Arbuthnot 1:04

Yeah, I appreciate you coming on. Obviously, we talk a lot about kind of the industry and service management, but you had an idea more forward looking as to what's going to happen in the whole space, which I'm excited to get into. There's obviously a lot going on at the moment, so it's going to be quite a big ask for us to project what the next five or maybe even 10 years in enterprise IT might look like.

Micah Singer 1:25

Yeah, I think a lot of people end up a lot of roles, you keep your head down and you're, you see the things in front of you are a few months out and it's really fun when you get to pull back and think about what's happening longer term and then tie what you're doing now, to those longer term trends, I know in my role, I'm always trying to do it. It's hard to get people to focus on 10 years from now when, 10 minutes has a problem. But but we'll try and do it on this call.

Tom Arbuthnot 1:49

I went back and forward on this, the whole AI is the hottest topic right now, everything is driving around that, so I feel like we can't not ask that question first, although I promise we won't spend 20 minutes talking about this. But where do you sit in terms of how you think generative AI is going to impact the kind of IT landscape?

Micah Singer 2:08

I don't want to oversimplify it, but for me, generating content is important and, a lot of it in pictures and text it's going to be mediocre, all right. But in software code, this is where the huge expansion is gonna be. So there's gonna be a lot more code and any organization that's doing development today has a backlog of requests, a road map, the things they never get to. And, if generative AI serves the promise of allowing productivity to enhance significantly in coding and software development, hopefully those backlogs become a thing of the past. A lot more software codes out there, that means a lot more use cases can be supported. A lot more user stories are met. And so the software does more.

Tom Arbuthnot 2:51

Yeah, that's interesting, I think that's one of the areas where that was one of the early areas. So GitHub had their Copilot service before all the Microsoft 365 Copilot branding. And it feels like an area where I don't want to say there's not creativity in coding because clearly there is, but it's an area where there's a defined problem to solve and there's a good way to solve it. And the AI could do that again and again. Potentially.

Micah Singer 3:13

Yeah, absolutely. And and, we've seen it already. The evolution of software. A lot of the software we use, especially web based software there's things that you used to have to do by calling a human or getting someone involved that you can now do, by yourself with code and it's always neat. One example, you know, when I'm booking a flight now, you can book a flight for a long time, but now you can do these complex changes of flights. Without a human being involved, and it's great. And it's just one, complex use case that our user story that's followed. I see that there'll be lots of these and lots of different areas. So there'll be pressure on software companies to build really complete offerings. And, and do it cost effectively. I think this is where AI is gonna make a huge impact on our space on IT infrastructure management.

Tom Arbuthnot 4:00

I wonder as well on the whole low code, no code scenario. That low code, no code story. Really, when I look into it is still, you need sort of a codey type mentality, but if we can get to the point where you can genuinely say to an AI, build a CRM system that lets me do this, and this, and it could do some of that, will we end up with lots more bespoke systems to meet business requirements? We've moved to a period where IT's got very generalized, like there's big cloud providers doing big things that we go back to a bit more bespoke potentially?

Micah Singer 4:30

Yeah, and I think bespoke is part of and then it's an interesting, question that we surely should get to, which is, what is the role of IT in the organization? And low code, no code is definitely facilitated by more software, but also changing that role. I would say that it favors people who are, more focused on being a polymath. They have a broad range of expertise, but they don't need to go as deep. Low code, no code is easier to do is what we hear in our world and no code's great. So you can do so much more. But how do you see it? What do you think the impact will be on the IT organization of AI and low code, no code projects?

Tom Arbuthnot 5:08

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because you've classically had infrastructure IT, end user facing kind of IT, business analysts that engage with the business and try and help. provide the solution and probably some in house development as well. So there are different teams within enterprise IT. It definitely feels and you talked about it, like the support end of it will definitely be impacted because a lot of those questions are very samey. Like this doesn't work. How do I do that? It feels like AI could solve a lot of that problem. Will it get rid of the classic enterprise IT support? I'm not sure, but I certainly see enterprise IT being more responsible for. There's now a plethora of technologies available to us. How do we help drive a business objective rather than spend our time in plumbing,

Micah Singer 5:52

I'm always trying to think of analogies. And one of them is maybe flying an airplane. You think when you get on a big commercial airliner and, there's a huge plane and there's a little cockpit with a bunch of levers and buttons and there's a person in there controlling this really complex piece of many technologies. And back in the day, it used to be, you go into the air with an engineer on board. You wouldn't fly with just a pilot. You'd have an engineer back in the back moving things. And then the next step was fewer engineers. But, fewer granular controls. And you had maybe some diagnostic systems that were telling you what was happening. But now, in airplane travel, it's really, you have this person who has general knowledge of physics and engineering and, cloud weather systems and cloud dynamics. And, you don't need to be an expert in any of those. You just need to be really good at all of them. So I think the generalist will be favored by these systems that support moving huge organizations or airplanes or whatever it is with less knowledge

Tom Arbuthnot 6:50

That resonates with me definitely. You're not going to be the person doing the plumbing or engineering how the thing works. You're going to be the person helping choose and navigate the solutions. The way that IT's gone over the last 10 years, it feels like we've gone from very bespoke on premises like bit of this bit of that to very generalized, the big cloud platforms all have in terms of UC as a service or office collaboration service, similar offers as a SaaS, but also we've got all this cloud technology where you can pick and choose and build your own solutions. Do we end up being custodians of some of these things come out of the box. Some of these things are custom to our organization. And I think you're right that there'll be a whole bunch of generalists that also have to be able to talk business or organizational requirements as much as IT requirements. It won't be a bunch of kind of propeller heads in the IT box. It'll be part of the organizational conversation hopefully.

Micah Singer 7:45

And, yeah, and I was just thinking about how to boil it down. So a lot of IT and technology is, you need people who know how to do things. So it's the how. So we need someone that can do how. And I think it's more in the future, maybe 2030 or 10 years, it'll be more 'why?' Why are we doing it? People who can answer a different sort of question which is important, which probably makes the job a little more fun. And more cerebral than it is now.

Tom Arbuthnot 8:09

Yeah you're not the firefighter fighting with the making the fundamentals work you're into business value. Hopefully.

Micah Singer 8:16

Yeah, absolutely. It's a technology cycle that we see again and again in different areas I think .Especially one like IT where all the stats are of spending. The cloud infrastructure spending, IT spending things closer to home like, UCaaS and collaboration spending has grown a lot and all the projections I've found just show it set to explode, double in the next, 5 years. I saw 1 that was 24% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) between now and 2030. I mean, Just really big numbers. So, that means a lot more complexity.

Tom Arbuthnot 8:45

Yeah. It's interesting as well the kind of weird dynamic of, certainly with the big cloud platforms when you see the vendors selling those in. It's not about the complex deployment or the management. It's all about like this is easy. This is value, but the reality is not quite there. There's still a lot of, pieces for Enterprise IT to tweak and manage and support. I feel like a lot of that will get ironed out to be more BAU, genuinely being able to turn it on and they'll be able to spend more time on the why are we doing this? What result are we trying to drive?

Micah Singer 9:16

So one question I have for you, and then you're a bit deeper into this than I am is, I love, this evolution and explosion of technology. And generative AI is great for software development. It's also great for hackers and, for things that compromise security. In this world where, instead of 20, 30, 40 billion a year. It's, 150 billion a year spent on IT security or IT infrastructure. How is security going to keep up?

Tom Arbuthnot 9:40

That's a really good question because all the tools that we're talking about here that can be used for good can also be used for less good or nefarious I'm really interested to see how we deal with the kind of spam, phishing, robocalling, AI conditions. Various people can talk about trying to keep that technology out of bad actors hands, but it's already out there. Anything that's out there, the bad guys can get to. So I am genuinely thinking the IT security landscape will just become like at the moment, again, it's a. Conversation where there's a team that needs to look after this, but it will become cause of the business. Digital is cause of the business. IT infrastructure is cause of the business. Security of that infrastructure will be cause of the business. But no doubt we'll have AI on both sides of the fence. AI trying to do the phishing emails and AI trying to combat the phishing emails. So it will be a big AI versus AI conversation, I suspect.

Micah Singer 10:32

I'm curious to see. Especially social engineering, is becoming more and more sophisticated. But with AI being able to provide a feedback mechanism to make it even better and to specialize engineering to types of profiles. It seems to me like the question of security is, what are the role for the largest technology companies? And what are the roles for startups and innovators? And it seems like the role for the largest companies is going to be creating that physical perimeter and creating security. This is what Microsoft and Google and Amazon be large enough to solve. And it may be in the same way that some of the antivirus software, You used to do your own protection and spam filter, and then you got something to protect your computer, and now you need something to protect your whole enterprise IT.

Tom Arbuthnot 11:15

Yeah, that's a really good thought. I think traceability of messaging content will become really important at some point as well. Like email is such a problem. It's such a great technology because it's a level playing field for everybody, but it's such a challenge because you can send thousands, millions of messages for no additional money, pretty much anonymously, so you can just blanket targets if it's all TLS by default, if you have to have certificates in some kind of infrastructure, it gets a lot harder to do that kind of attack. But it's interesting. We're only five people at Empowering.Cloud, but two people joined recently, and both people, clearly something is scraping LinkedIn because we immediately got the kind of WhatsApp type message of Hey, I just joined. Tom said the bank account details have changed. Please send me this or that. And clearly that's not an individual doing that because we're too small to worry about that. There's some kind of automation there just scraping LinkedIn and chancing automated emails. So the automation's there now it'll just get better.

Micah Singer 12:14

We do these quarterly Security trainings are, you know, 10 or 15 minutes. I think a lot of companies do. It's computer based training. And, it's to make people savvy to, I don't know. Don't play with your phone in a crowded elevator or, don't pick up the USB key in the parking lot. And I understand it's worth 15 minutes for us all doing it, but it seems very inadequate to the challenges that are coming our way.

Tom Arbuthnot 12:36

Yeah. Email's particularly hard as well because how do you tell a non technical user to watch out for fishing these days when it's normal to get emails from something@info.company.com or you could have said back in the day, if it's not the .com, it's not them, but companies have now a subdomain for marketing or a .co or whatever else, like there's no hard and fast rules. It's a sense of this doesn't feel quite right. But yeah, it's not a kind of black and white conversation anymore and you both want employees to try and be helpful and go the extra mile and simultaneously tell them to be paranoid and don't tell anybody anything ever, it's a tough one.

Micah Singer 13:12

So at Kurmi. The customers we're dealing with, 1 of the first 2 questions they ask us is about security and, what precautions we're taking And we are taking a lot and, every company worth the salt has to investing in this. But it feels as we and as everyone moves to cloud, we're leaning more on. For us, it's Azure. We're leaning more primarily on Azure to put tools in place and then just to follow certification and compliance rules like ISO and SOC and those are sometimes window dressing. You might have the right process, but really protecting that perimeter is very difficult. And I think, we'll look forward to in 5 or 10 years, I think this will be just a bill you pay to Azure or AWS..

Tom Arbuthnot 13:52

Yeah. Yeah. Your antivirus analogy seems interesting, which is like the biggest provider in the world will have to group together to be like, if you come on any one of our platforms, we're all sharing the bad actor information so

Micah Singer 14:04

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's too much. There'll be too much. It's too overwhelming.

Tom Arbuthnot 14:07

So a bit closer to home, like obviously. The hybrid work thing feels like we're almost done now, just people can work from anywhere. But I don't feel like we've seen as fast as I thought we would that I as an organization can now employ people from anywhere because if they can work from anywhere, why do they need to be in the home country necessarily? My prediction is that we'll see globalized hiring happen more and more because, companies are aware of costs and they'll see opportunities for talent anywhere in the world. Do you think that will happen? And if it does, what does that affect for kind of business needs variety?

Micah Singer 14:44

So I think it is happening. I've been really curious about reading studies of this, especially post-pandemic to see, how much of a blip that was in sort of people working remotely and from home. But I saw something that said, we call it hybrid work, but in 10 years, it'll just be called work. Especially for knowledge workers where location's not that important. The keynote at the Cisco WebEx event last year, he talked about the office being a magnet, not a mandate. I thought that was quite compelling. The idea you'll come to the office if you want to, or if it makes sense. But what we're seeing, and I was reading the McKinsey does a study workplace study every year, and they came out with their one in July, and it mentioned that among larger enterprises the average days in an office per worker has been steadily declining. Went down a lot during the pandemic, but even taking that out, it's something it's gone from 3. 7 to 3. 2 days. So there are trends towards remote work and any trend toward remote work hiring people where they sit or letting them sit where they want leads to more communication tools. There's got to be more tools that they're using. There's lots of things we know about. There's specialized tools for domain within a company, within, an industry So I think this trend is part of the amplification of IT infrastructure spending. And I don't know why we would see a reverse on it. I think even national borders might come into play, like you've said.

Tom Arbuthnot 16:05

That feels like an interesting kind of paradox, doesn't it? We're both simultaneously developing the tools to work from anywhere, and it feels like certainly in my time in IT, it feels like more than ever before I'm being asked questions about where the data is located. Is it within boundaries, different geographical rules on data processing? And if I can hire people from anywhere, maybe I can from a technology point of view, but I can't from a data point of view, or I can't from a regulatory or tax point of view. So does that shape the landscape that while we have the technical capability, the regulation actually slows that down?

Micah Singer 16:40

Yeah, it probably will. The world's in a bit of turmoil now. I think there's these boundaries. But even within national borders, I think people are gravitating to work life balance or less commuting. And especially among the group that's consuming IT infrastructure most heavily, which is, again, knowledge workers and people like us. We're working from everywhere. It is really interesting to see, the direction these are going in. And, more IT spend, does it mean more providers. I alluded to it earlier. And, I think that when it comes to solving big problems, there'll be a few people solving them. The platform providers. But when it comes to all the small innovations, big companies don't tend to be good at that. Tends to be smaller folks who have very domain specific knowledge. Do you see IT expanding in maybe the average amount of IT systems used by a large enterprise going up or down in 10 years?

Tom Arbuthnot 17:33

Yeah, I see it going up. I think to your point, there'll be a core like everybody needs some kind of email, some kind of file sharing system, some kind of meeting system, those are fundamentals. And they'll probably be two or three providers that just become the door. If you look at email, there's not 15 providers vying for competition. There's a couple left. And I think it'll be the same for the core. But because of all the cloud innovation, the ability to create your own line of business apps, or for a startup, or, 50 people to build the world class thing for that industry. They are the best GP practice scheduling tool. They are the best, XRM for gyms, whatever it may be, but they can build. With that cloud scale with that security with that compliance, because they're building on top of these cloud platforms. I think we'll see more of that. And I think businesses logically are going to want to be competitive. So if everybody's using exactly the same IT platform, that's not competitive. They're going to be looking for that edge, be it that they. Bake it in house or being that they'd go to, like you say, a smaller company, a more focused on their industry kind of company.

Micah Singer 18:41

And so one trend, I think that follows on that. That's fascinating is historically really large companies that are making a ton of money would use that money to like Cisco's done it quite well. They'd use it to buy, innovation. They

Tom Arbuthnot 18:56

Yes, that's been their classic model, hasn't it? They will either spin out or sub invest and they almost admit they don't innovate in house, they go buying and absorb basically.

Micah Singer 19:06

And the reason they would buy is because the way for them to monetize that thing was to own it and to sell it to a lot more people until, you know, everyone wants Yammer. Everyone wants a social app. So Microsoft buy Yammer spread it around. But I think what's happening more and more is these big companies have figured out how to monetize without buying. At Kurmi, we're part of SolutionsPlus. We're an independent software vendor for Microsoft. We're in the crowd at Avaya and we were just at Zoomtopia and there's all these new ways of running a platform that let you provide security and infrastructure and monetize it without ownership. I saw Nvidia even did it the other day. They have a pretty active venture fund. Like all of these companies are investing in startups that are not them. They're about innovation. They use them as a platform.

Tom Arbuthnot 19:53

That is interesting. Yeah, you're right, there's two trends there. So one is that they want you as an ISV, as a solution creator to use their platform. So they're making money out of you that way. So, if you're winning, they're winning from that point of view, but also a lot of them are pushing for marketplace models, aren't they? Because Apple makes so much money out of that B2C. Marketplace scenario, you can see the Microsoft are very active on this. They want you in their Marketplace to present the solution to customers so Microsoft is taking a much more reasonable percentage, but they're still looking to take a percentage of that business. So yeah that for the first time, they're motivated to have solutions run through a marketplace because they could make money on you as using their infrastructure and you through a transaction potentially.

Micah Singer 20:36

In a way it's sort of good. I was a political science major way back in school. And, we talked about hegemony and large companies are exercising this. You don't have to go conquer the land or buy the company. You can provide the better, more fertile ground for them to act in and monetize it that way. I think that will be a trend that we see a writ quite large. The companies that can get to that platform level, which is not easy will be in a great position and it bodes well for innovators, who have ideas and,

Tom Arbuthnot 21:05

Yeah that's a really good point. I also think that the larger customers, maybe all customers have worked out that when the product gets consumed into the Google, the Salesforce, the Oracle, the Microsoft, innovation, naturally slows down like Yammer was the thing. It was doing lots of seats. went into Microsoft. It became one of 20 things. And that product is a good example. It's stalled out. It's not even the hot thing anymore at Microsoft. If that had been standalone, they'd be in control of their own destiny and living and dying by renovation. So I think some customers certainly realize that it's not necessarily better to take the product from the large enterprise, if they want to be on that innovative agent, and also if they want to have influence over that product. If it's a one or smaller product company, and you're a customer buying it, you have much more likelihood of impacting the roadmap and what the requirements are if you're working directly with that vendor versus the giant cloud provider.

Micah Singer 22:03

Absolutely. It's interesting to prognosticate. It's interesting to identify these trends. Bringing it back down to I think everyone who's listening to this is saying, how does this apply to my business? And, that's for you to figure out. But hopefully there's been some good insight. I know that's something that we spend quite a bit of time on. Every quarter we do strategic advisory committee meetings and try to use that sort of like far forward knowledge to inform what's happening in the next year at our company. You guys are doing it. I'm sure as well.

Tom Arbuthnot 22:31

Yeah. So give us a bit of taste of that, Michael. I know you didn't want to get too much into the Kurmi stuff, but what's top of mind for you in your space?

Micah Singer 22:39

It's the two fold move to cloud. Kurmi as a Service is something that, is our historically on-prem product, which is being transformed into a cloud product. We already have customers on it. But, it's a work in progress to make it as robust or even better in a cloud product is different from an on-prem. So make it work best in that model. And then it's really just, not us just moving to cloud. But the UCNC tools that we allow enterprises, ultimately, IT administrators to manage are moving to cloud. So that presents new challenges for them. There's more systems. So we need to solve more problems. It's not just Microsoft and Cisco and Avaya anymore. And then There's problems of cost management, so it's not just provisioning, which is a lot of service management associated with provisioning. There's licenses and cost management and efficiency. And then there's performance management. How is it performing? Is there fraud? Is there uptime? And what can we do about it? Our strength is talking to the UCNC machines, actually the granular conversation and settings. There used to be a human pushing a button to do something and kicking off a complex workflow. Increasingly, it's a ticket and service now or some other system kicking off a complex workflow. In the future, it will be an AI ops system or some sort of intelligent analytic device kicking off a workflow that fixes something. So more and more automation around IT management. Because if IT spends going up, The more you spend on management is the less you spend on tools that improve your digital worker population's lives.. We think this is making a case for outsourcing and we're trying to make it less. Expensive and less time consuming to manage the complexity.

Tom Arbuthnot 24:23

Yeah, as that spend goes up, you want to make sure you're driving value out of it. Like you say, the licensing implications, the usage implications as well as the ops is definitely a big talking point, I'm sure.

Micah Singer 24:34

Absolutely. What are your next steps for Empowering.Cloud? Your audiences is really interested in these topics. But how do you see this unrolling for you?

Tom Arbuthnot 24:41

Yeah, so we've got two strings to what we're doing. So we've got all the free education content, which is sponsor backed so thanks to you guys for supporting that, among others. And then we have the working directly with enterprise and Microsoft partners. And the biggest thing we're hearing from enterprise is dealing with the operational part of Microsoft 365, the speed of change, the comms from Microsoft, some things are in the roadmap, some things are in the blog, some things are mentioned at events. So we've started pulling all the change into an Azure database and we're slicing and dicing it and providing reporting to enterprises to help them manage the change. We're still in the early phases of that, but that seems to have really struck a note with enterprise customers. I haven't spoken to anybody yet. Who's like, Oh, we've totally got that handled it's fine. Everybody's like, yeah it's, it's hard. Everything is moving so fast in so many directions. It is so integrated now. So I think an increasing part of our future is helping organizations deal with that change, understand it, know what is going to be user impacting, what's going to be IT impacting, what's just for your information. But it's a super exciting journey to be on. I think there's just so much going on in our space.

Micah Singer 25:48

It's great to talk about it. We look to you guys for this kind of insight to keep us focused on the knowledge that we need about Microsoft. And, the videos and trainings are really, great for technical personnel in particular. And actually, we we've talked about adding a few to that. So we'll try and do that over the next little while. But in the meantime it's great to be part of the community.

Tom Arbuthnot 26:07

Awesome. I really appreciate the support, Micah and thanks for the insight. We're going to have to look at this in a few years time and be like how far on or off were we on our predictions?

Micah Singer 26:14

Hopefully, we're right on. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Arbuthnot 26:17

Cool. Thanks a lot.