On January 20, 2020, ThinkTech Hawaii sat down with Servpac’s Richard Zheng (President), Charity Ching (Solutions Engineer), and Cory D’Orazio (Digital Marketing Manager) to discuss their PTC experience and brand new data center facility. Check out the video and transcript below:
— Full Interview Transcript —
Richard Zheng: So this is really exciting news for the businesses. And, you know, I even have a customer asking me – should I sign up now? They worry about when we open, they won’t have a space.
Jay Fidell: So, Cory, you know, I have a hard question for you. You know, we’ve been talking to a lot of people here at PTC. We asked them, you know, what they see in the future for telecommunications. And we get different answers. We had this off the record conversation with a fellow from Amazon that was very interesting. Amazon sees this as very important – a telecom for everybody. We live more of our lives, like it or not, in telecom than we ever did before. And the generations coming up – they’re going to live more of their lives and in telecom, connecting with everyone everywhere. And one guy we talked to a minute ago was into texting. It’s a texting service and not only on cell phones, but also landlines. And I suppose you can do that easily. So my question to you is where is telecom going in the world? I mean, you’re here so you can smell out the answer. We’re only on day one. Have you? Have you worked out the answer, Cory? Where is it going?
Cory D’Orazio: Yeah, I would say Richard may have a better answer.
Richard Zheng: So, you know, when you look at the progression of how companies really from phones, Internet, cloud and now finally data center. So when we see the future, we think cloud, these are going to be the future. Just like everybody talking now, you know, like content is king. Right now, you have cell phone pictures. Do you even save in your hard drive? Most people just save in their iCloud. You know, cloud is the future and that’s why we got a data center. We have fiber optic networks. And eventually, you know, I think the business side is going to follow the consumer. The consumer is already moving in the cloud, so businesses will do the same thing. Hawaii is about two to three years behind the mainland. Most businesses in Hawaii, they’re thinking about moving to the Cloud. Let’s move the e-mail server to the cloud. They have Office 365 or G-mail instead of changing servers and maintaining and managing it. So we see within two or three year terms, we’ll move the application and data over to the cloud. That’s why when we build data center, we want to not only provide a local cloud, give people low latency and local support packages them together will also help these medium, large business to migrate to the cloud. So that’s why we have a solid infrastructure. By the end of the day, a lot of these things don’t matter. Once you have the foundation right, but you need a solid foundation. Once we have that, you know, we’re going to focus on moving to the cloud to help customers move to the cloud and help Hawaii businesses move to cloud.
Jay Fidell: I’m learning about the cloud now and I don’t know what I would do without the cloud and sort of like a data center all in my laptop because I can have as much stuff as I want and it’s automatically safe in the cloud. And from a business point of view, that’s what the data center does. But you know what? We have to hear from a millennial or an almost millennial. Charity, what are you going to be demanding in terms of the future. Where do you want to see telecom get you? What do you want to see the cloud get you? What is going to be your demand 5 or 10 years from now?
Charity Ching: I would probably want things now or I want to ensure or have confidence in knowing that it’s like. For example, you’re thinking cloud, right? That definitely where it’s going. And so I, a personal example, have my cell phone and pictures on it and I don’t want to transfer it over to a hard drive since we can save it to the cloud. So what I want to do and make my life easier is to be able to just save all of my pictures to the cloud and not even think about it and just know at any given time in the future, I can go back to that and have access to it without even worrying about is it there? Is it really? Where is the cloud? I guess that’s another little thing, right? We want it now and ensure that our information is safe. And I can. Get to it whenever I need to. Technology continues to grow and what I want is whatever is available to make my life easier.
Jay Fidell: You know, there’s the Microsoft people have a cloud. Apple has a cloud. Amazon has a cloud. All these companies have a cloud. Do I need to have a cloud with all of them? Because sometimes I can’t remember what cloud I left it with. So what do I do? Cory.
Cory D’Orazio: So Amazon, Microsoft – there are lots of big cloud providers. I would say if you are looking into having a cloud service, I recommend a local private cloud hosting service because especially if you have a lot of data that’s being hosted in the cloud, you want it confidential and don’t want other people to have access to. If you’re a local business or someone here in Hawaii, go with someone like Servpac who provides a more private hosting service. It’s more secure, more safe. And you know that your data is available locally in the right hands.
Richard Zheng: I mean we’re really excited about attending this event, present our company to the world and talk about where we going forward. You know we have all these clouds and it’s going to be a multi-cloud because one cloud cannot service everybody’s needs. So you need to have different clouds including local, Amazon, Azure, and Google. But we’re here to help people navigate through the process to be able to say if this application is better to run Microsoft or AWS. There’ll be other applications that have low latency. High, iOps. You want to run locally in Hawaii, which you know, by the way, we have a call for you.
Richard Zheng: So we want to be the integrator to give customers the whole turnkey solution. At the end of the day, customers care about service. They don’t care what backend or which cloud to use. They want be able to access information right away at their fingertips without thinking.
Jay Fidell: I take it you guys agree with that. Anything there you want to disagree with, speak now? Okay. I’m sold Richard. We got to talk. Thank you, Richard, Charity, and Cory. Great to talk to you guys. Aloha.