dnsUNFILTERED: Rob Cramer, CIT

 

[00:00:06] Mikey Pruitt: So if you could give me a little bit of background about yourself and how you got started in it and what led you to see it.

[00:00:15] Rob Cramer: Sure. So I have a degree in computer science with an emphasis in management and data processing, which was a fancy way of saying back in the day that I took a lot of programming classes and I took some accounting and managerial type classes.

And I had to take some database classes. That was their data processing component of the degree. But I fell in love in college with with networking. I had a class in T-C-P-I-P protocols and and really found a niche there that I really enjoyed. So when I graduated I got I got a job initially as a what they call a PC coordinator.

It really got me into Novell servers and networking. I was able to really cut my teeth in that in that area of of the IT world and grew from there. I went on to a very large corporation where I was supporting Novell networks doing actual hands-on deployment.

And at a point in time when I wanted to get out of the Fortune 500 world and into something a little bit more local. I found CIT I found CIT back in in December of 2000. So I've been here for over 22 years now. Again, starting off as a field engineer doing Nove and desktop support for our customers all across the the twin City metro area.

And about seven years into my tenure here at CIT. I decided that driving all over the place was not ideal for me. I liked the idea of being able go to an office and be more of a network administrator and to have a little bit more of a standard routine. And that's where I really grew into this managed service role.

I was the first engineer at CIT officially designated as a managed service engineer. I took on the role of really building this up back in 2007. So I've been running the managed service team here at CIT as a as a full-time gig, if you will for a number of years now. We really grew out of a var, right?

So CIT was a value-ad reseller. We had some white box PCs back in the day. We did a lot of of installs of network gear and servers and desktops for our clients. And as the industry was growing and changing and we saw the potential and the need for full on remote management we started our managed service as a team.

Our team now has what are we about 35 team members dedicated to the remote support functionality maintaining the tools and the customer environments. And we've got somewhere around 20,000 endpoints that we support.

[00:02:36] Mikey Pruitt: 20,000 is a lot. Is a lot. Keeps us busy. I was, I'm super curious about because when I was getting into networking, it was like the year 2000. Like I wired my college dorm because we wanted to, download things faster. So that was around the year 2000. And you were already like in the corporate world, like working on.

What you, what are Novell networks? So tell me what is a Nove network?

[00:03:03] Rob Cramer: Novell was and actually is, I've run across it a couple times even recently. Nove was the kind of the, in my opinion, the better. Of the network server environments, they had directory services for your securities, so your username and, file access rights and everything were stored in the Novell directory.

And the, at the time again, this is back in kind of the late eighties, early nineties Nove was really for a lot of businesses, the defacto standard for networking for that shared storage and authentication. Security type of environment. Microsoft came out with Windows new technology, windows NT way back in the day, right?

And they introduced their directory services in there. And as Windows 2000 came out and they changed the name to Active Directory Novell found they had a real fight on their hands. And because of Microsoft's name and marking muscle. I think it's like one of those Sony, versus Betamax type of VHS versus Betamax type of of fights where not necessarily the best technology one, but the one that had the better marketing and better muscle behind it.

So Microsoft ultimately won out. I spent a number of years, as a field engineer hooking Novell Directory Services up to Windows Directory Services to synchronize user accounts and to move files across and to basically shut down the Novell environment and make them a Windows active directory environment.

So it really was a competitor to Microsoft back in the mid nineties.

[00:04:23] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. So it's like a server host model and it still uses TCP ip,

[00:04:27] Rob Cramer: yeah, there, there was actually a different protocol that was their native one, but they did operate over T-C-P-I-P. So in the end, Novell was really back in the day it was all coax, right?

It was all thin net and potentially a thick net backbone. And more of a a, a. A string of connections. It wasn't your typical into a hub and spoke out to, to the endpoints. You literally had your ethernet cable your thin net that ran from machine to machine.

You had to put Terminator on the end of it to make sure everything operated correctly, and you can only have so many on a, on a. On a segment. You often had servers that had, four or five NIC cards in 'em to go out to different segments to, you can only go to so many D devices. It's

[00:05:03] Mikey Pruitt: like the old school VLAN was just a different wire.

Is that what you, different wire? That was pretty

[00:05:08] Rob Cramer: much it. Yeah.

[00:05:09] Mikey Pruitt: That's really cool. So let me ask you about computer integration technologies for a minute. So you said you began there around 2000. You've been there for about 23 years now. Which is very impressive. The most the thing that stood out to me most on the website that you guys have on the about page is that, and I got it up here right now it says, it all started with two guys on a fishing dock, which I feel like the majority of businesses, at least in my life, or start that way.

So tell me a little bit about that. And those two guys.

[00:05:38] Rob Cramer: Chris and Mark originally worked together at a different company here in the Twin Cities area. And and they were out fishing. I literally fished on the end of a dock fishing one day and they said, we really should start our own business.

And we see this need in the market. We're not just gonna sell white box PCs. We actually wanna take care of the customer's networks. We want to get the technology out there. We wanna make this technology work for their business, right? We don't want to just sell them stuff. We wanna make that stuff do everything it can do to help those businesses be successful.

So that's really been the focus of CIT ever since day one is not just to sell a piece of technology to a customer and walk out the door. We wanna make that technology. Give that business a positive impact so that business can be successful. So every time we sell technology or sell a solution to a customer we want to make sure that we're backing that up, that we're that we're selling 'em the right solution, not just for, not just technology for technology sake but technology to solve a business problem.

Maybe even a problem they didn't realize they had to start with, but we can show them how we can use technology to help their business be more successful.

[00:06:36] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. And so your role at CIT as the director of managed services like that is the core business. Is that correct?

[00:06:44] Rob Cramer: Yeah, so the core business is still, we still sell a lot of hardware.

We really do. We still sell a lot of servers and switches and, wireless access points. And so this is still a good chunk of the business around that, that, that VAR functionality. But services is definitely, the other half of that, the other side of the coin. And it's not just managed services.

We, we have, reoccurring. Onsite field service doing projects and maintenance and break fix stuff for customers. The managed services is really focused on the remote support the monitoring the alerting, the taking the phone calls for the users and remote ends of their devices to help resolve issues.

It all comes together. We also have low voltage cablings. We get out there and we'll cable their network we'll install, cameras and security systems through one of our chosen vendors. That help them secure the physical premise as well. We're very security focused, so our security team, our soc is focused on, making sure those environments that we're supporting are as secure as possible to help eliminate as much as, can be eliminated these days.

The security holes make sure that we're trying to take every precaution to, to keep the customer's environments and their data secure as well.

[00:07:49] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, the whole point of cybersecurity is not that 100% effectiveness. It's that mitigation and filling as many holes as you can. Recovery. Yeah, it's a recovery.

[00:07:59] Rob Cramer: If something does happen, can we recover? Do we have the backups? Do we have the ability to get the customer back up? Is data encrypted? So if it does get exfiltrated that there is, some. Some level of confidence that the, maybe the cut the thief can't actually use the data, type of thing.

There's a lot of things that go into that, and that's not my field of expertise. Our security team has got some really smart individuals on there that they they deal with that kinda stuff every day. Then we also have an app dev team. Our, our app dev team is helping customers with custom apps, custom websites, custom, things like, microsoft Services, power bi, how can we use some of the cloud services to really, give you some automation and some better workflows?

[00:08:35] Mikey Pruitt: So that really sounds like a differentiator with CIT is that, every company's these days is just gonna need technology in some form or fashion, and it sounds like CIT can really fill all of those needs in like a one place.

[00:08:51] Rob Cramer: We, we do try to be your one-stop shop, right? There's, there are some things that we will we are not the experts in. We're not gonna be your traditional typically your traditional like phone vendor. We're not gonna come in and install, a Toshiba or some other type of phone system and claim to be the ones, to be the experts on supporting it.

But, we do a lot of cloud-based services, teams, voice other vendors that we work with. To provide those types of telephone services for customers. But we're not gonna sell you something that we can't support, right? So we're not gonna come in and sell you a product just to to make a sale to have the customer be disappointed in the after, aftercare.

If we can't support it, if we can't make sure that we're there to see you through all the hard times. Then it wouldn't have been a good relationship. And that's really what it's a relationship. We're here to be your trusted technology partner. We wanna make sure we're using top class tools like DNSFilter, we've chosen to partner with DNSFilter because we feel like it was a better solution than what we were previously using.

[00:09:47] Mikey Pruitt: That's the soundbite I was talking about, Rob. That's great. So let me ask you, so you guys sell you kinda have these two, two halves of the business hardware and then services, which, you know, Mary's perfectly together, one can feed the other and vice versa. But tell me about the move to cloud services.

I'm sure a lot of your, service customers are now moving to the cloud. Has that helped or harmed the hardware business in any way? Or is this beautiful hybrid been created?

[00:10:15] Rob Cramer: It really depends on the customer. It depends on their needs. It depends on the environment. There's still a lot of traditional onsite customers out there.

They want their technology on-prem. They want it physically available to them or housed in a local, data center type of thing. But there are some of the customers, especially some of the, smaller businesses who don't feel the need to have that physical hardware present.

They can survive entirely on like Office 365 Azure Active Directory. Maybe if they need a vm, it's, hosted up in Azure type of thing. And so we're happy to service those types of environments. Alongside the traditional on-prem stuff, has it hurt the hardware business?

I think what we've seen is as some of those services change where we move them to the cloud, it, it's a an offsetting balance, right? So they maybe aren't buying as much hardware, but there's a little bit more involved in the service and support side of it to keep those environments maintained.

And our business has not seen a drop off in the overall growth of the business. It's been a shift in balance, maybe a little bit, whereas maybe hardware used to make up 70% of our business now maybe it only makes up 50% or maybe a little less. But services, have compensated for that and because of the new services and cloud and everything else we're still on a growth path.

[00:11:26] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's like you're prepared either way and you're gonna have to have some type of equipment on site, just no way around it.

[00:11:35] Rob Cramer: Yeah. In this hybrid world, so many of us work from home. We're not even on the, in the office. I'm working from home today.

I just got back from vacation. I'm working from home rather than running into the office today. But I have the flexibility to do what, whatever I need. I got internet, I can work.

[00:11:46] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about that for a second, and how the, did that at all that remote work people working from anywhere, have any type of was it a input into the decision to move to DNSFilter?

[00:11:59] Rob Cramer: We were previously using another product that did a similar functionality, right? It had a remote agent that go on the machine. So we had some of that control already in place. We just wanted a tool that we felt was. A better fit for us than what that we were previously using. The one we felt we were using before was becoming a little I'm trying to think of the right word I want to use here, because Don't worry, you don't worry.

Don't have to go any further. I

[00:12:21] Mikey Pruitt: know what you mean.

[00:12:22] Rob Cramer: Yeah. It's not that the old tool was necessarily bad or didn't work. I mean it worked but we were having some significant challenges and some specific areas for users, especially around. Things like users on VPNs, where the other tool would potentially have conflicts with the VPNs that were, we were having trouble getting support and getting, working through those issues.

And we found DNSFilter, we were doing some testing. We found that it was much more reliable and much more flexible when it came to the VPN functionality which drove our decision to make the move.

[00:12:51] Mikey Pruitt: That's actually really good to hear because a lot of people struggle with VPNs and the truth is like there are a few pieces of software that DNSFilter and any other DNS agent trying to control DNS just will not be compatible with at all.

But VPNs, a lot of people just give up too quickly because the trick is to tell the VPN to use DNSFilter's, roaming client. As its DNS server. And it's hard to explain that, with details because there's so many such a variety of VPN software and there all their interfaces are different.

It's like somewhere in this VPN configuration is a DNS server. Settings find that, and that's how you can make it work with any VPN on the planet almost.

[00:13:35] Rob Cramer: Yeah. Again it's been a we're still in the transition phase actually. We still have probably. Close to half. Our endpoints are still on the other tool.

They haven't been migrated yet. We're still wearing that, that rollout phase. It's taken a little longer than we'd originally hoped. But that's because there's a lot of data that has to be moved, white lists and content filter settings. Things like that have to be moved from the old tool to the new one.

And, we wanna make sure we're not rushing it. I originally hoped to have 'em all done by sometime mid May. We're getting some traction now, but it is taking a little longer than we originally hoped.

[00:14:05] Mikey Pruitt: That will sort itself out eventually. It's, yeah, it, when you set out on something like that, like DNS is not trivial to convert to a new service.

For sure. We try to make it easy as possible, but yeah, there's definitely some lifting that has to happen on your side, so I'm glad you still decided to switch. Thank you for that, Rob. Tell me a little bit about like just yourself, like when you're not, working for CIT, what are you looking to do for fun or just what fills your mind and perhaps like creative endeavors that actually help you in your job, accidentally, perhaps.

[00:14:43] Rob Cramer: I got a few interests outside of the technology. Or at least outside of my work role in technology. I I dabble with some 3D printing. I've been having some fun making some different items. For my daughter. I recently printed her a a 3D dice tower that is a storage box that holds her d and d dice and can actually be used to drop 'em in to do the rolls and stuff.

So she's really enjoying that. I I actually have a wood lathe in the basement. I do a little bit of wood turning from time to time. I haven't been down there recently, but I've got some nice black walnut that I got from one of my my in-laws neighbors. They had to take a tree down, so I got some of their wood.

And at some point I hope to be able to turn some bowls and some, some other items out of that. And then I enjoy unwinding with some good audio books. A lot of, a lot of streaming shows. I sit in ve a little bit once in a while, just unwind. And then during the summer we like to get up north to the family.

Has some some property on a small lake up north and we like to get up there and play in the water.

[00:15:34] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. Yeah. My, my go-to as water as well. I can just through the houses across the street here, I can actually see our ocean, right? I'm like, yeah, it's right there. But that's great.

Yeah. And unwinding is very important. And I'm just curious, like at the scale of CIT, like how does that, how is like the culture built at CIT I don't know how many employees you guys have. Maybe you can tell us, but what's mid one

[00:16:01] Rob Cramer: forties, I think right now.

[00:16:03] Mikey Pruitt: Okay.

So that's about the same size as DNSFilters. So how does that, culture get built at CITI imagine it comes from the two guys on the dock fishing a lot.

[00:16:13] Rob Cramer: So culture at CIT is I mean we recently are, went through a fairly significant evolution. One of the, one of our founders is starting to work towards being able to retire and step a little bit more away from the day-to-day operations.

And so we've. Kyle Eder is our president, CEO. Now he has taken on that mantle. And he's really driven, CIT forward using EOS. So we're an EOS organization and have been really adopting a lot of the philosophies. Around the EOS framework that leaves a lot of the responsibility on the team leaders to, to go through and work with our teams on removing hindrances, removing things that get in their way of being able to to do their jobs and be effective.

And in doing so, our goal is to really focus on our core values. At CIT, we have our core values listed as part of our hiring process. We actually want to know that somebody's a good fit. We want the right people, the people who share our focus and our our ethos. And if we find those right people and they have the skills we're looking for then it's gonna be a successful match, right?

It's gonna really propel the organization forward. So the entrepreneurial operating system so it really teaches us that, when you have people who share your core values, share your your focus. That that it really can be this genesis of environment that, that, you, you are all are rowing in the same direction, right?

And as you do that the, you're sharing the same the same goals and the same philosophies. The culture is just there, right? You're just you're all on that same team when you've got that that those individuals who maybe don't quite fit. They, they can be a distraction.

They can be, toxic to the environment and that actually can be detrimental to more than just your customers and their customers. The feel it can actually be detrimental to other team members. We've spent a lot of time over the last several years. And really refining our higher hiring process around the core values, really making sure that the world defined.

I, I worked with my team specifically in managed services a couple years ago, and we developed what we call our. Our customer service vision statement. And that came from the team members. They sat we got a group of 10 team members together from all levels of the organization.

And they sat down and they took, pieces of information from like our core values and from our mission statement and everything else. And they came up with this phrase. That really surmises what it is. We wanted to be in managed services what we want to aspire to be in managed services.

And that was to say, we, the they put this together, which I was really proud of them to do this, but they came up with the idea that our statement should be knowledgeable, trustworthy and friendly staff providing effective support and solutions for every customer.

[00:18:54] Mikey Pruitt: I knew I did that. Yeah, that's great.

[00:18:56] Rob Cramer: And the idea is that pulled together our core values, right? What is it we're here to do? How is it we want to behave? So it was, it really kind of something we spent a lot of time, focusing on.

[00:19:05] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And that's really good to hear.

Like actually DNSFilter operates that way. There's this blueprint and you're independent, but you're following the same blueprint that everyone else is, and you're trusted to do your job well. And there's accountability steps, along the way. And that's great to hear. That c it is doing that as well.

It makes me feel like DNSFilter is also on the right track.