Cloud migrations with confidence

Welcome To Hammering it Out with Hammer.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Hammering It Out with Hammer. Today I've got a, a special guest for you, Greg Pavlick, of our SE team. So Greg, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here. So I usually like to start out the episodes, kind of giving a little bit of a background as to who my guest is and, um, you know, if you don't mind, Greg, um, yeah, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sure. So, um, I've been with, Hammer now going on 13 years, and I am the team lead for our sales engineering department. I have a background in contact center architecture, with a number of contact center leaders, in the past

with Avaya Nortel, um, even back to paras on the IVR days. And, was a contact center architect for, for many years, for about 20 years with those companies.

I use that knowledge to acquire our own solutions with our customers, um, to their environment. So it comes handy, and, I'm glad to talk to them today with you.

Excellent, Greg. Thanks so much. So, you know, one of the biggest things that, that seems to be kind of a recurring here lately, um, is folks wanting to talk about migrations. So one of the big reasons I wanted to, uh, you know, talk with you today, I, is really, you've got vast knowledge

of the industry and kind of how things have been changing over the years. And, you know, in some of our, our previous episodes we've talked about the hammer tool set and, you know, some of the value it brings.

But today what I'd like to do is kind of talk a little bit about, you know, what is it, what do we mean when we talk about, or what, what do customers typically mean when they're talking about CX migrations?

And then maybe get into, you know, where does, where does Hammer fit with the tool set, uh, as it relates to like, you know, the use cases and the tools that we have, um, to really get value, or provide value to the customer.

So, you know, if you don't mind, let's, let's talk a little bit about, you know, just what you're seeing right now today, um, as far as migrations and what that that typically means when folks are talking about migrations.

Yeah, sure. So we're seeing a lot of our customers migrate from what was typically a legacy on-premise platform to the cloud, and they're doing that for many reasons.

Number One, they don't have to worry about maintaining hardware and software on-prem any longer, and just gives them more flexibility with a cloud configuration than they would having to maintain that real estate for a data center as an example, or a computer room.

So that's one of the things that, we see happening a lot. The concern with that, that for many customers, face is that they, they feel as though they lose control over their platform, right? But think about how they controlled their environment prior to when it was on-prem. If something went wrong, they had their teams there and they were able to go in and just go in and fix it and look at it when it's in the cloud, now they've feel as though they've lost all control, except if something goes wrong, they have to file a support ticket.

Yeah. So for them, preparation is everything. And many customers don't wanna rely on a game of chance when they do this migration, and that's where Hammer comes into play, where we can actually come in and number one, do a baseline test before they migrate. This is very popular with customers. They'll actually go in and baseline how their on-prem existing infrastructure is performing and save that. And then when they migrate, we will come in and do a second test or the follow on migration test to make sure that that cloud environment is operating as the same proficiency as their on-prem environment was operating at.

Right, right. So that's a very good, good example. Yeah, no, I love it. So, you know, one of the things that, that, um, automation that comes up a lot is, you know, time to value, right? So in these big projects, um, you know, I feel like the vast majority of who we talk to, they talk about being able to just reduce overall effort and increase time to value. So, you know, to your point, a lot of the, you know, on-prem to cloud, uh, a lot of the things, the itfalls that you run into trying to just use humans to do all the work, um, you know, being able to automate a lot of that's extremely valuable.

So regarding the migration, so we talk about upfront, let's talk a little bit more about like the, the DevOps lifecycle. So, you know, we hear oftentimes, you know, the DevOps lifecycle within say app development or things like that, but you know, I see Hammer, um, as, as kind of that DevOps or DevOps tool, um, in the CX environment. And to be honest with you, you, there's not many out there. I mean there, we've got a couple of competitors, but we're by far the most mature product on the market when it comes to DevOps Lifecycle.

So tell folks a little bit about how we play in all the other components, not just the beginning.

Yeah, sure. And um, that's a great point, Eric, that you bringing out because we've actually designed our tool set to follow a DevOps lifecycle, whereas, you start out with business requirements and then you can build your QA process, 
either from discovering those business processes, either calling an application and having that automated to build out those scripts for you, in our tool.

And then taking that and being able to provide complete UAT testing, before you're ready to go into what we call the staging, cycle. And that's where after I've completed my UAT testing, then I need to be able to make sure that that's going to hold a bundle load. So you can take those scripts and they're all integrated. So I can move that UAT test script right over to a performance test script and run a load test right within the same tool.

Yeah. Without you having to sign out and sign back in. Right. Um, once I run that load test, what I'm able to do then is expand that to an active monitoring solution, and I can still take that same script and move it right over to active monitoring. So it gives me a complete lifecycle from the development of that script, right through the performance of the load, and then into day two monitoring, making sure that it stays healthy and active. And you do that all within the Hammer tool set.

So it's really very efficient, for teams to get off the ground up and running very quickly within one single pane of glass.

Yeah, I, I mean, Greg, that's, that's fantastic. So I understand that that being said, here in the last couple of weeks we've started rolling out some promos, and I've got, uh, a few that I, I just want to have you tell, the audience about, so Hammer One, do you mind giving us a, a little bit of insight to that one?

Yeah, sure. So Hammer One is, one of our most important promos that we have going on right now. It's really a low test that we offer to our customers, a one hour free load test to really look at their environment and see exactly in that one hour, we're able to glean information as far as how calls are coming into their environment, are they expecting any type of carrier or postal delay or any type of latency with that call delivery.

And then once we're in that application, we're able to test the capacity, right?

If it's a certain load, we wanna make sure we can reach up to that certain load. So Hammer One gives us that capability, it's a free one arrow load test, um, to the call capacity of our customers choice for that promotion.

And they can take that and we would provide full reports for that load test. And they can actually watch the dashboards as, as the test is running, so they could be part of it and see the experience of really troubleshooting the 
environment while we're running a load test.

It's, I love it. And one of the things that, that, I wanna make sure the audience understands when Hammer runs a load test, 95% of the time we find issues. So, you know, if you're a partner and you're dealing with a customer that is making a big change, this is a critical time to have that conversation because, you know, as much as we love to say that the platforms are gonna per perform up to, you know, SLAs and things of that nature, they often don't and, and, or at least not initially. And so having that insurance policy, I, I think is fantastic and, and we're doing it for free. So, you know, let us know.

so Greg, there's one more that I wanna touch on. And I think this one's really cool and it falls in line with that migration, path as well is the, Hammer Number Audit.

What about that?

Yeah, this is a really efficient application that we have available and, we're actually doing it as a, as another promotion, as you mentioned, where many customers, or companies in general will have numbers, typically TFN numbers, and I mean a lot of 'em, either a couple hundred, a couple thousand that they don't know where they're going, they could be going anywhere.

They may be going into dead air, they may be disconnected, they may not even be live anymore, but they don't know because it's too much for them to take on. So Hammer Number Audit will go out and actually run through every single of their TFN numbers.

We will transcribe what the greeting is so that we know where that number went and what it reached and what it said to us, and then we can provide that list to the customers to give them a complete view as to what their TFN audit looks like. And this way they're able to decipher, some numbers worth keeping, or do they need to clean up those numbers and really save money and, and disconnect them?

Yeah, absolutely.

No, and that, and, you know, think about, I guess a couple of, of use cases. So I can see that, um, in, in kind of the pre-production, production and almost, or, or development cycle, and then almost at that, that deployment stage. So, you know, we, we run the, the test initially, we figure out all the numbers, like, you know, to your point that are, um, you know, valid, the ones we want to keep, where all the destinations are, and then in the migration, okay, now we've developed and we want to, we've ported our numbers, now we can do a port test, validate everything, you know, is still there, and then maybe even at the end of the project, still rerun it to validate that nobody made some, some changes, right.

So, I love the promo. I hope people contact us, let us know. With this video we're gonna have some, contact information for you. So by all means, please reach out. Greg, it's been a pleasure. I, I always, love getting a chance to talk to you. So if, nothing else, we, thank you and talk to you soon.

My pleasure, Eric. Thanks for having me.