Legends of Tech

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Legends of Tech on Cloudflare TV. Today, I've got the honor of a super legend himself. They call him the best dressed man in IT. He runs a channel in ANZ. He's worked for companies like Fortinet, Verizon, Firewall Systems and now Aruba. Please welcome Brandon Blume. Bring it on, buddy. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks, mate. What a welcome. I'll try to live up to that billing if I can. Great to be on here with you, mate. It's exciting. No, it's good, mate. Thanks for having you on the show, man. But before we get into the crux of the thing, one thing I want to ask about, how was your camping trip on the weekend? Camping trip was good. It was actually our first ever camping trip. And it wasn't, I guess, what purists would call traditional camping. There was no tent. There was a fire. There was marshmallows roasting. But we hired a camper van, went down to a place called Trial Bay, about 500km north of Sydney. Weather was a little bit dicey. We had a fair bit of rain. But mate, all in all, we had a fantastic time. My wife and four-year-old son Blake really enjoyed it. And yeah, we definitely do it again. Perfect, mate. So when's the next trip? Listen, when I say I'd do it again, I mean I'd eventually do it again. I don't think it's going to happen in the next 12 to 18 months. So we went with some friends and they sort of said, now you're hooked. You're going to go out and buy a caravan and all of these type of things. I didn't have the heart to tell them that that's never going to happen. But listen, I would do it again. It was a lot of fun. And my son had a great time, most importantly. So, you know, stay tuned. I'll let you know. Mate, perfect, mate. Well, look, it's good to hear, mate. Next time, mate, to be honest, last time I went camping would have been 20 years ago. So I might have to pull you up for some tips. What was it like driving a big Winnebago through the countryside? Mate, I've got to say the most difficult part, we picked it up and it was just driving it in peak hour traffic in Sydney was a little bit difficult. I mean, you imagine trying to change lanes in that thing. It's a little bit hard, but mate, all in all, the good news is it's so big that when you put on your indicator and you start moving across into that lane, people break because they don't want you to hit them. So at the start it was, I've got to say, it was a little bit scary because you've got your family obviously in that thing and you're going fairly quick down highway. We had a fair bit of rain as well, but by the end of it, I got fairly comfortable in it and it was actually quite good to drive. So yeah, no problem at all. Mate, perfect, mate. Well, that's good, mate. Hopefully a few more stories around camping. So mate, always, always, where I like to start is, mate, how did Mr. Brandon Bloom himself get into the crazy world of the technology sector here in Oz? Well, great question, Chris, and I'm glad you asked. Look, I left school in 1997, late, yeah, 1997. That would have been correct. And what I did was I went on a basketball tour of the US and sort of had ambitions of potentially playing college basketball over there. That didn't quite work out and I came back, you know, 17 years old and it was time to find a job. It was early 1998. My mother had been, you know, a 45-year Telstra stalwart and was at Telstra at the time. And she sort of said, if those sort of remember, Kelly Services was the recruitment company that Telstra used pretty much exclusively. And if you wanted to get into Telstra, they were the people you went through. So my mother sort of told me when the next round of inductions were happening. I remember still, you know, my mother took me in there. I was out front of the Kelly Services office. I didn't know how to tie a tie. We had to stop an old man on the street who had a tie on and he quickly whipped it together for me. I went in, I went through the interview process and I got a job early 1998. I was 17 years of age at Telstra in customer service, what was then business and government. So it was essentially provisioning, right? You know, provisioning ISDN lines, PSDN lines, on -ramp 10, 20s and 30s, DDS fast way frame relay networks for those older listeners on the call who may remember those things. You know, huge speed back in that day, you know, you could get 64k connected to the network, bursting up to 128k if you wanted to pay, you know, an incredible amount of money. So that was my entry into, you know, really what was the telecommunications world around that time. It was just before deregulation. So it was an interesting time to come into the industry. And Telstra was a really good, I guess, a really good learning ground for somebody that wanted a career in technology. You know, Telstra at that time sold everything. So, you know, whether it was, you know, one 300 numbers, contact center solutions, you know, Internet, mobile networks, they basically did everything. So you've got a good breadth of exposure, a little bit of exposure to everything. I got my first sales role when I was actually 18, after being in the customer service role at Telstra for about 12 months, I moved into an area called telebusiness. And there was a couple of different areas. There was an account management side, and they had a certain sort of profile of customer that they looked after within telebusiness. There was also Big Pond Direct. So this was the beginning of companies having permanent connections to the Internet. Prior to that, it was all dial up. And now you could have a permanent connection to the Internet for people that wanted websites and things like that. So that team called Big Pond Direct, also that was in telebusiness. I worked for Mark Harrison at the time, still one of the, I still know Mark to this day, he's at Verizon. Hello, Mark, if you're listening. You know, one of the great motivational managers that I've ever had. I still remember Mark walking the floor early every morning and saying, are we on fire? What are we going to do today? And getting everybody whipped into a frenzy. So that was at 18 years of age, my first, I guess, foray into sales, my first ever sales role at Telstra. And I didn't look back sort of since then, the rest is history, so to speak. Yeah, great. So I guess, you know, growing up or being in high school, your aspirations were to become a basketball player. So was that the- You know, you always hear growing up or you sort of see in Hollywood movies that, you know, you have that moment where you realize and it all clicks in and you say, I want to be this or I want that particular career. You know, I want to be a fireman or I want to be an astronaut or whatever it may be. I never really had that moment, I've got to say. I was, you know, passionate about sport and sort of sports mad my entire sort of school life. And basketball by the time I got into high school was really my focus. I'd sort of narrowed it to that. So, yeah, sort of had ambitions of that. I think like many people, I probably had the talent, but not the dedication. The talent's probably the more common part. You see a lot of people that have got plenty of talent, but the people that can mix that with really focusing all of their energy in terms of hard work around their training and their discipline are typically the people that go on and have professional careers. So, yeah, it's funny. I look back now and it would have been really good if someone would have told me in high school, whether it's, you know, the guidance counsellors or whatever you may have, that, yeah, something like that. You could have a career in sales and what that looked like and a career in technology. I don't think we, as an industry, probably do a good enough job in promoting ourselves to people coming out of high school and out of university and really giving people an understanding for what a career in technology could potentially look like and the various roles that are available. But, you know, I was always a person that got on really well with people, was a good communicator, found it really easy to build relationships and really, I guess, connect with people, lots of different types of people. So, a career in sales was a good fit for me. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, and you're absolutely spot on. I mean, you speak to anyone in your industry. It wasn't a traditional way of coming into the industry, right? Like, you know, you went from college football, not college football, basketball, wanting to go there, then you're working at Telstra a year later. So, absolutely. It's crazy. So, how many years did you spend at Telstra? I was at Telstra for about four years. I started in, as I said, early 1998, was there until sort of end of 2002, 2003, where I took a redundancy. If you've never done it before, I highly encourage it. It's a lot of fun. If you're a young man or a young woman, and you don't have any financial commitments, mortgages, children, things of that nature, it was a lot of fun. I took what seemed like more money than I knew what to do with. I think it was only $15,000 at the time. But if you go back to sort of the early 2000s, the 22-year-old, $15,000 was huge. I think maybe $20,000. I can't remember. But it was enough money for me to, you know, go and travel and buy my first motorbike. I think I bought or upgraded to a GSX-R600 and had a lot of fun with that. And my next stop, I started, I worked for Richard Branson and Virgin Mobile, so stuck within the telecommunications industry and sort of spent the next probably six or seven years doing that. Okay. What was that like, I guess, going from, I guess, Telstra, who's been around, done that for a long time, then going to a, I guess, to another company like that? Was there, I guess, similarities between the organisations or was it like going into two different worlds? Completely different world. And I think when you're at Telstra, and I've heard people sort of describe it this way, even to this day, Telstra is so big, there's so many people, you really got blinkers on to some degree with what the rest of the market and the rest of the industry looks like. You look at everything through a Telstra lens and it's really hard to imagine when you're inside the machine, what the rest of the organisation looks like and how it works. It's a very unique organisation, obviously, being, you know, you have the heritage of being partly coming from a fully government owned and then obviously partly government owned into more of now a private enterprise. So Telstra was unique. And I think coming out of that and working for Virgin Mobile at the time, they were a startup, they were new in Australia. It was a completely different experience, culturally, certainly, but also where that business was and what we were selling. We were reselling, essentially, the Optus network and really focused on trying to give people a better deal, very much a price play, not really a business play. It was a lot of sort of small business as opposed to any of the corporate stuff. And that's where I'd come out of at Telstra. So that was really interesting. It was a different challenge. I learnt a lot, you know, more of a hardcore sales culture, you know, making a certain amount of calls per day, very much a lot of outbound and really trying to get our name out there. So that was an interesting experience. I spent a couple of years there at Virgin Mobile. I got to meet Richard Branson on two different occasions, which was exciting. One of the times, the original Virgin office was in the Chifley building in Sydney. And Richard was doing some promotional work to launch the brand. And he had a tank full of beautiful women in army outfits and water pistols. And he crossed the harbour bridge and drove the tank all the way out front of the office, which the entire office was out there waiting. And then he jumped out and started squirting me with a water pistol. And we got to have some drinks with Richard that night and dinner and an amazing man, definitely. And hearing more about his story and his approach to business, I found really fascinating and the success he's been able to have, obviously, over a long period of time. So, yeah, that was an interesting stop on the journey. And, you know, from there, I sort of, from there, I ended up in a company called Comindico, which, you know, if you've been around, you may remember, they had the largest MPLS network, actually, in the Southern Hemisphere at that time. Really build themselves as the ISPs, ISP. So a lot of wholesale and carrier business. And I sat within that team. And that was also, you know, really interesting and sort of continued my journey about, you know, being a sales guy in wholesale and carrier within that telco space. Yeah, no, amazing. On the Richard Branson front, I actually went to a seminar last year where he was at. It was just amazing just to see how the type of guy he is and how we sort of thought of things. It was funny. This is pre-COVID. So no one knew what was going to happen this year. And he was going to launch his new, you know, instead of doing planes, he's doing shipping or cruises now. So imagine that. You're about to launch, you know, a multi-billion dollar new adventure, which looked pretty interesting on paper and that happened. But I guess, you know, from a business context point of view, it's quite an inspirational person to see him take on all the big things, all the big challenges throughout his whole career, like whether it was, you know, Virgin Music, mobile or, you know, whatever else he was doing. He's very much a challenger in the industry. Yeah, and I think I read his book back around that time that I met him and his biography is fascinating, particularly when you look at the early stuff around Virgin Music and where that came from and what he was able to do and really change, I guess, the course of that industry. Fascinating guy. I remember seeing an interview with him. I can't remember the name of the show, but it was some type of business show in the UK where they've got, you know, CEOs and various people come on and talk about, you know, themselves and the successes they've had. And you had all of these people that go on this show and they've all sort of walked out on stage and they've got, you know, beautiful three-piece suits on, you know, it's filmed in London, you know, really well-dressed, you know, what you picture a CEO looking like. And then you had Richard Branson and he walked out in like a T-shirt and some jeans, sort of more like a, you know, a Silicon Valley type of, you know, tech entrepreneur. And this was sort of back, you know, maybe early 2000s or late 90s. So he was always a different sort of guy and did things in a different sort of way. And I think particularly the care and the attention that he took towards his own employees and the way he treated them. And obviously I got to see that firsthand was I think one of the reasons that he was set apart from a lot of others. And you hear some of these ideas. I mean, he had a business called Virgin Bride, and that was really a one-stop bridal shop for people getting married. And that concept, as he explained to us, he was on one of his planes, you know, flying between the UK and America. And one of the hostesses was talking about how stressed he was hosting a wedding because I've got to go to a cake place over here and a wedding dress place over here. And from that conversation, he decided why not a one-stop wedding shop? And we did a lot. So things like that, he was always open to hearing new ideas and tapping into people around him. And I found that fascinating. That's fantastic. So mate, you spent a bit of time in the telecommunications sector. When, how did you get into the actual vendor space? Yeah, that was interesting, right? I think around that time, if I sort of look at around the time I was at Comindico, I'd left there and I'd taken an opportunity in sort of around sort of 2003, 2004 to work for MCI. MCI were obviously a really large American carrier who had some interesting history around, you know, financial things and some of the stuff that was going on out of the US. They were acquired by Verizon. And I was doing something similar at that time. I was really a wholesale and carrier account executive focused on a lot of, you know, ISPs. We were pimping voice minutes, what we used to call pimping voice minutes to a lot of calling card companies. You'd be selling them routes and calling card companies would be using that. So I was still in that space. But what was happening, Verizon at that time had acquired an Australian company called Cybertrust, who many would remember, you know, heavily based out of Canberra, really focused on network security and cybersecurity. And I started to see really around that time, the merging of the telcos and the system integrators, you know, Telstra acquired CAS. That was one of the first sort of big moves. You obviously had Optus acquiring AlphaWest and many others that sort of consolidation of telecommunications and the IT world was coming together. And I sort of looked at that as probably the future and where I wanted to go. An opportunity came up to join a tiny little company called Firewall Systems, who I'd never heard of. They were in distribution. I didn't know, even six months into the job, I still wasn't clear on the role of a distributor and what we actually did. I was working for Scott Fruin and Nick Varikios, who, you know, for me, you know, I know you know them well and the absolute legends of the industry, you know, the best guys in terms of understanding and what they did with the channel. And I got to learn over the next seven years, really the channel business from those individuals and others. I was hired into that role as an F5 BDM, so a funded headcount from F5. And we had managed to just secure that business exclusively. And they wanted somebody on the distribution side, really to help them build a channel. F5 at that time had very limited presence, about five people in Australia. And they really wanted someone to help build a channel. And that's what I was hired to do. That ride was absolutely amazing. Once I worked out what the distributor did, it was a pretty amazing journey. So we sort of went from, you know, Firewall Systems and the story there was, you know, Scott and Nick had sold land systems to Wescon. Scott had gone and lived in Belgium for a while and sort of taken some time off. Nick had sort of stayed running Wescon. And then they got together again and acquired a small watchguard reseller out of Melbourne called Firewall Systems, owned by a guy by the name of John Labzer, who's currently at Palo Alto and working with my wife. Hello, John. And the rest is history. Scott and Nick changed the model from VAR to VAD, from a reseller to a distributor. And really was a security-focused disty. And F5 was their biggest vendor at the time. And the ride that I had there over the next seven years was pretty amazing. I mean, we went from, I think the first year I was there, there was maybe 13 people within the business. We were turning over somewhere in the vicinity of $17M. I think my last year there, we represented probably close to 50 vendors, had about 130 staff and did, you know, $280M in revenue. So that was the journey over a 17 -year period, over a seven-year period. It was extremely exciting. I'm seeing that business change and grow and getting to learn. I mean, I had a regular meeting with Chris Poulos, who at the time was running F5, and myself and Scott every Monday morning. So getting to go to meetings and really sit in meetings with guys like Scott through and understand, you know, how this channel business works was invaluable and, you know, really got to learn the channel from the best. And distribution is such a good place if you want to get into IT. There's no better place to start than distribution because you get to work really and see how a whole bunch of vendors work. You get to understand things like partner programs and MDF and the pressures around end of quarter and working for, you know, publicly listed company and how Nasdaq really drives a lot of the behaviour from a vendor perspective. That's just the reality. And you also get to know all of the resellers and the integrators and the carriers and what drives them, what makes them tick. And you're sort of that middleman really trying to translate the technology into business outcomes for customers. So I found that a really enjoyable space to learn, to meet a lot of people within the industry and love the seven years that I spent there, probably one of the most rewarding, one of the most rewarding jobs, certainly in my career. Absolutely. In terms of, I guess, the function of, you know, distribution and channel, were all the skills that you learn at Pretortias and the Verizons and the things completely different in order to operate within that environment? I think a lot of the basic stuff was transferable. I think even at Telstra and within telecommunications, you were talking about technology. So it was a technology cell, but probably at a slightly different level. I think one of the things in distribution, you're one removed from the customer. You've obviously got a partner that's doing the selling to a customer and your role is to support the partner. And obviously you've also got the vendor that wants you to do a bunch of things for them as well. So it's understanding what are the outcomes that the vendor is looking for and how you're contributing to that and what they need from you to be successful. And the partner is going to need a completely different set of things from you. So you're sort of in the middle of trying to understand both agendas and trying to give both parties what they need to succeed. So that's, I think, the biggest challenge and sort of getting your head around that. But in terms of a lot of the basic skills, they remain the same, being able to communicate, being responsive. I've always been someone that wanted to achieve a win -win outcome for everybody involved. So the ideal scenario, the customer gets what they want, customer first, customer last, as we say at Aruba, as you know. So customer gets a good outcome, you help their business, solve a problem or get a competitive advantage, be able to deliver an experience that's unique to them, their employees, their customers. Hopefully, the partner gets to sell a big deal and makes money and wrap services around it and does all the things that they need to have a successful outcome. And obviously, you as a distributor and your vendor, you want them to get the deal as well. So those ideal scenarios, when everyone comes out a winner, everyone's made money, everyone's happy in terms of what's been delivered to the customer, that's the ideal scenario. And I think you look to repeat that whenever you can. That's brilliant, mate. We've actually got a call that's posted a question for us, mate. So I just thought we'd play that. He's a champion guy. He's a big fan of the show. So let me just play it, Brandon, and then we can go from there. Yeah, no problem. Hey, this is Jason calling from San Francisco. Chris and Brandon, loving the show. Brandon, earlier on, you were talking about how you wish someone in high school would have tapped you on the shoulder and let you know what a tech career path could look like. What would your elevator pitch to yourself sound like today? Also, second question, when you were camping, I don't know, in the States, we have something called s'mores. It's a dessert we make over the campfire. Do you have s'mores and is Vegemite involved? Thanks a lot. I'm going to answer, Jason. Thank you for the question. I'm going to answer your second question first and your first question second. S'mores, I don't know what that is. So I'm not sure. We kept it pretty traditional. We roasted marshmallows on the fire. Trying to keep my phone to only two marshmallows was probably the biggest challenge. I don't think we ate Vegemite the whole time we were away. I think I'm usually a Vegemite and butter toast man in the morning or maybe on a crumpet, but we stuck to the bacon and eggs by the campfire and that type of stuff. In terms of what my elevator pitch would be to my 17-year-old self or younger about the IT industry, I'd just say, you know, would you like a career where you can earn really good money, probably equivalent if you're having a good sales year to a doctor, but without the eight years of learning and study and all of the things that they need to go through without the pressure of having somebody's life in your hands as well, but also an opportunity to, you know, go to lunch a lot, meet a lot of beautiful people, really interesting and different diverse people from all over the world, a job where you can travel, not just, you know, kickoffs in Vegas, but, you know, work for a lot of global companies where you can get a job really anywhere in the world in this career and a job where you can do a lot of different things. You could, you know, be in obviously a channel role where I've come out of, you can be a sales role where you're really working with customers and trying to deliver them outcomes. You could be in marketing, you could be in operations. So there's really a career for everybody with inside the information technology industry. And yeah, it's a great place to be. Perfect, mate. And we've got another question here. This one's not a played one, it's a written one. Brandon, what has been the most defining or pivotal moment in your career thus far that contributed to being a key driver to your overall success as a channel leader? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think, you know, really the key thing for me is the people that I've worked with and the people that I've been able to learn from during my time at Firewall Systems or what turned into Distribution Central, what is now Arrow. You know, I worked for a guy by the name of Mike Fisher. Again, Chris, I know a guy that you're very familiar with, one of the coalition of the willing. Hello, Mike. I know he loves the show and he's probably out there listening. Got to learn, shout out to Mike. I've got to learn a lot from him. Really got to learn a lot from Scott, from Nick, as I've mentioned. In my current role, I remember I had sort of two offers when I came to Aruba to join another company that will remain nameless or to come to Aruba. And it was really sitting down with David Elliott and Steve Code. And, you know, obviously, Chris, you were at Aruba at the time and were a big influence on me choosing to come here. But really, I think sitting down and listening to guys that have been in this industry for a really long time, and I guess being fairly open and willing to learn from them in terms of what's made them successful and what best practice looks like in terms of that channel management piece. You know, the ride that I've had here at Aruba has been amazing over the last five years. I'm just about to change roles, but I've spent most of my time looking after customers like Optus, like DXC, had a really big focus on Optus over the past five years. One of the defining things was, I guess, getting our technology stack productized within Optus was a really difficult and long journey. We now have, I guess, a productized Wi-Fi switching and also ClearPass offering with those guys. That was really pivotal in terms of, I think, in my career, being able to work with such a, I guess, a big organization, very political. You've got the Singtel business as well that has input in the decisions and, you know, the vendors that I work with in country. So you had to work across borders and with people outside of Australia to be able to make that happen. But certainly that being able to deliver that and some of the success we've had with Optus off the back of that, most recently with New South Wales Health and starting to deploy hospitals with those guys has been really exciting. Fantastic. And there's a second part to that question as well. Second part is, where do you see the greatest challenge in the next 18 months for both channel growth and partners alike? Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting. I mean, obviously 2020 is a year that we've never seen before. So I think a lot of it is really unknown in terms of what the future is going to look like. What I think, you know, we've certainly seen looking at it through an Aruba lens is that, you know, businesses that were maybe not nimble weren't really, I guess, on track with digital transformation before COVID hit or were in a lot of trouble or dead in the water after COVID. So what we're seeing is a real acceleration of a lot of projects that help businesses really, you know, come into the 21st century, so to speak. I mean, some really basic stuff. I mean, we had a lot of customers and budget being moved from customers because they didn't have laptops and their staff didn't have the ability to work from home, didn't have VPNs, didn't have dongles where they could dial in or an Internet connection. So some really basic stuff was a real obstacle for some businesses. When you look at us within the IT sector, we're fairly advanced in terms of our ability to be able to work remotely and work from anywhere. So a lot of those challenges I think are key. I think from a reseller's perspective or a partner's perspective, it's really more critical than ever to be close to their customers and understand how they can help them transform. Because I think the way that we traditionally have done business, we won't be doing business that way in the future. And I think the customers that can adapt to that new world the quickest are going to win. Okay, perfect, mate. Mate, we're nearly at the end, mate. You're kidding me. I'm just getting started. I know. So I'm sure we're going to have to have a part two at some point, mate. Yeah, sure. One final thing I'd like to ask, I mean, in terms of what motivates Brandon, before we end the segment, I'd love to get some words of wisdom from Brandon on what motivates him and I guess what's some of the key advice you can give out to the people out in the industry. I would say in terms of what motivates me, certainly being able to provide for my wife and my now four-year -old son. That's sort of the key thing that's always in the front of your mind when you get up and go to work every day, being successful and being able to provide a lifestyle for those people that I want to be able to do and be able to support him in the way that I want to do that is critical in terms of a motivating factor. But also, as I said, I've always been a guy, I'm competitive by nature. I've come from a big sporting background. So I want to be successful and I want to win and I want that for our company and for the partners that I work with. So just being successful and understanding what success is to different people and helping them achieve that is key. I've always really enjoyed the enablement side of working in the channel and really enable and working with sales people, with engineers and helping them understand what our differentiators are and why we're unique. So I really enjoy that. In terms of advice, you've always, since I've been in this industry, I've had a lot of people talk about work smarter, not harder. You hear that a lot. I would say it takes, in my experience, a long time to be able to work smarter. So until you work out what working smarter is, just work harder. I think the harder you work, the easier everything becomes. And I think, you know, just enjoy and have a passion for what you do. I think if you get up every day, you know, we're really lucky. I think those of us that work in this industry, you know, you look at what's going on in Melbourne, you look at a lot of other industries that have been decimated in terms of a lot of redundancies. We've been really, really lucky in the IT industry. We've been affected, but we've managed to weather that storm fairly well. So I think just be really grateful for what we've got and have a passion for what you do and be resilient. I remember having an old boss who used to say the ideal combination is a smart guy, obviously an engineer and a thick skinned guy, which is a sales guy. And you've got to be resilient. You've got to be able to take the knocks. And I always look at the challenge of we've got a very inconsistent industry that we're in. You've got ups, you've got downs. It's a roller coaster. And I think you as a sales guy or a customer facing guy, I've got to try to remain consistent in terms of your approach and your dealings with people in what is a very inconsistent environment. That's probably the best advice I've got. That's brilliant, my friend. Mate, thank you so much for your time today. A real stalwart of the tech sector. Like you said, a coalition of a willing member. Mate, appreciate your time, buddy. We should have a second session at some point. Happy Wednesday. See everyone.