Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure: An Interview with Colin Gribbin

Steve Sidwell:

On this episode of The Tech Bench Podcast, we’ll be speaking with data center and cloud infrastructure expert, Colin Gribbin. Colin has over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. During this interview, he discusses hybrid cloud, virtual machines, infrastructure as a service, containers, and so much more. Get ready, you’re now entering The Tech Bench Podcast.

Colin Gribbin:

I’ve always liked technology, science, et cetera, et cetera. So I got started doing it in the dawn of the internet, website design, and software solutions for clients in the mid-’90s. I worked for a company called Globex Corporation, which was a very large global hosting company. We did everything there, all your dedicated server hosting, colocation, data center services, streaming media, managed firewall, intrusion detection solutions. So everything spawned out of that to some degree or another, and I’ve always been on the cutting edge of technology.

Steve Sidwell:

Is that where you met Rich, at Globex?

Colin Gribbin:

Absolutely, that’s where I met Rich, at Globex. He headed up our managed security services department over there. And so I used to sell a lot of firewalls to our clients, working with Rich. I think he heard me singing over the cubicle wall one day, because I’m slightly known for being a bit of a character. And then from there, managed security services, streaming media solutions, mobile application development, software as a service, HIPAA compliant applications, financial technology solutions. So I’m back in infrastructure again because not that much has changed, but then a lot has changed. And to the degree where it used to take weeks to deploy infrastructure, when we talk about we bring it back. Traditional data center services, big, huge white space, raised floor 36 inches off the ground, cooling, power, conditioned power, multiple substations coming from multiple feeds, fiber connectivity, blah, blah, blah.

Now it’s being delivered with cloud. What does that mean? Well, there is software called orchestration software that allows you to turn on servers programmatically within minutes, within seconds, based on certain criteria and thresholds. And that’s really revolutionized the industry quite a bit because now on-demand computing really happens. And that’s what they mean by the cloud, that’s it. A lot of people, maybe it sounds like a mystery to other people, but it’s not. It’s data center services that you’re able to deliver almost instantaneously.

Steve Sidwell:

That makes a lot of sense. I just realized too, that we’ve been rolling for a little while here and I still haven’t gotten around to introducing you.

Colin Gribbin:

Sure.

An Expert in Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure

Steve Sidwell:

So with us today is Colin Gribbin, He is a data center and cloud infrastructure expert. He’s got over 25 years of industry experience, and I know that because we’ve worked together a number of times over the years. Thank you so much for coming on today, I really just want to start out by saying that. What you’re saying about the cloud services really makes a lot of sense. I know that honestly, when I started building servers, this was… Gosh, I guess mid-’90s, old SPARC IPCs, IPXs, all that kind of stuff. It was, we’re going back a long ways in history.

Colin Gribbin:

Sun Solaris.

Steve Sidwell:

Exactly.

Colin Gribbin:

That was the killer OS.

Steve Sidwell:

I mean, this was 4.1.3_U1 here. And back in those days it was a very, each box was its own thing. And so you had to plan out on paper, every service that you were going to deploy, what you needed to do to configure it out of the box because a good 20% of it came broken. And that was just for one system. So over time, we’ve migrated to not looking at systems and looking at actual services that you’re going to deploy. So boring things like mail servers, database, general file storage, all that kind of stuff is out there. But as we were talking about it before the show, I realized that a lot of the stuff has been the same, but that has seen a lot of change over the years. Part of it is what you’re saying, is that you can just turn things on in a flash, but tell me more about that. Where does this stuff live? Where does this stuff exist? I’m not just turning on cooling in a flash, I’m turning on a whole array of services that I’ve been able to pre-configure.

Elastic Computing with Data Centers

Colin Gribbin:

It’s elastic computing, and we all know the big name out there that really made utility computing happen. But it’s extended between physical machines, then you have virtual machines where you can replicate the operating system. You can image the entire server that you need and the operating system, all the configs that you need for that to deploy. Now it’s gotten, workloads are being launched in containers, application containers now. So not only are you automating all the hardware and all the backend infrastructure, you’ve got all the cooling behind it, all the power, all the servers, the operating systems. But now you even have the applications being automated and you’re able to spawn those instances, instantaneously. So that’s where it’s made a major change, for sure. It used to take days or weeks to get servers up and running to deploy.

Now you’ve got a set of… And it depends on what the client needs. Do they have an elastic computing need? Do they have a workload that’s always standard? Great. Well, maybe then you go traditional data center and that’s the big thing. Everybody talks about, “Ooh, we got a cloud for our strategy.” Well maybe you do and maybe you don’t. And maybe if you do, it might not work out for you. So everything has to be done intelligently. If you’ve got a workload that’s good in the data center and you don’t mind CapEx, you can go traditional colocation. You buy your equipment, you put it in a very high end data center with great connectivity coming in. There’s the big five out there, I would say as far as data center services around the globe and that’s how you do it if you’ve got the CIS admins to manage it. Otherwise, then you could talk about the cloud.

Steve Sidwell:

So you just talked about colocation. Just to straighten us out here, because I know that we talk about this stuff internally but tell me a little bit, just from your experience. What do you see more as colocation versus cloud hosting? Is this really, am I understanding this right? Tell me more about that.

Colocation Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting

Colin Gribbin:

Absolutely. So the internet runs and I explain this to my children in any way I can, it’s layman’s terms. The internet is run on heavy, heavy hardware and software distributed all over the globe, and it’s in these rock solid data centers. 100,000 square foot facilities, all white space, we call it. Raised 36 inch flooring, all the cooling, all the air conditioning, that’s data center services. Now, how are you going to deliver that as a solution, as a client, to your end customers? You’ve got two options, basically. Traditional colocation and then rented servers.

Rented servers are your cloud servers, however you want to slice it. We used to call it custom hosting or dedicated hosting, managed hosting, it’s cloud. It’s all cloud. It might be private cloud, it might be public cloud, but those are your two flavors. And the data center services, colocation, where you own and operate your own equipment in a third-party data center or cloud. When you’re like, “I don’t want to be a server hugger. I don’t want to be bothered of managing all of it and buying all of it. I just want to spin it up.” It’s your hardware. It’s your infrastructure as a service is the key term around cloud service.

Steve Sidwell:

So this is really, it comes back to whether or not you can tie the instance of your OS back to a real physical piece of hardware. It sounds like that’s kind of where a lot of it is going. Whereas, with colocation it’s going to be in a cage. It’s going to be, you know that when you connect to this server over SSH or however you’re connecting to it, you’re actually talking to a server. Versus something where you’re going in through a hypervisor and you’re talking to an instance, or something like that.

Colin Gribbin:

And you could do both, there’s bare metal cloud, too. A lot of clients think of virtual machines, I need this much compute and I need this much storage. I need the CPU, and I need this much RAM, and I need this much storage. That’s your typical virtual cloud.

Steve Sidwell:

Is that your hybrid model?

Colin Gribbin:

That’s your VM, that’s your virtual machine, traditionally called public cloud. But then you’ve got your bare metal cloud, which is the physical machines. You could still rent the physical machines and turn them up with the orchestration software. And there’s a couple of major brands out there. There’s OpenStack, which is the open source one, you’ve got VMware, which is huge in the enterprise. You’ve got Hyper V, which is the Microsoft product, so you can get any flavor you want.

Steve Sidwell:

And then on top of that, you can get it even more abstract. I think this is where you were going earlier, that what we’re talking about there is, without listing the names of companies, but you can get just a VMware image or something like that. Where you’re just spinning up a virtual server that maybe it’s connected to bare metal in the backend somewhere, maybe it’s not. But then you can actually just buy and rent services, just raw data processing, data storage services with some kind of wrapper around them. So maybe I can get a database server, but it’s not even a server. It’s just connectivity to an isolated database. That’s something that you guys, I think have been working on that type of thing a long time.

Colin Gribbin:

That’s a great point.

Steve Sidwell:

That’s something that’s really changed the industry, I feel. I mean, from my experience.

Infrastructure as a Service vs. Platform as a Service

Colin Gribbin:

That’s the next evolution in that cycle, straight data center services, infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. Now you’ve got platform as a service, where you’re delivering databases, maybe it’s a NoSQL database. You don’t even care what it is but it’s a NoSQL, it’s big data. You’re talking about all this big data analytics, how much data is coming in from your e-commerce, from whatever. Data scientists are in huge demand because people are trying to take all of this massive data, make it pertinent, package it, and sell it as a solution to other businesses. To give them a cutting edge in the industry, in their marketplace. And so you’ve got that infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and then we know more about software as a service. Platform as a service is the newest member of the family, which is sandwiched in between software as a service and infrastructure as a service.

Steve Sidwell:

Now when you’re talking software as a service, is that more like a Office Live 365 type thing? Is that-

Colin Gribbin:

Exactly.

Steve Sidwell:

Are you talking about that?

Colin Gribbin:

That is internet based software available on a per-user basis, on a monthly recurring charge to those end users. And that happened first to some degree before any of the other automation, really, quite honestly. You had your data center services and then you had these internet companies like Salesforce which really made that market. And then I used to work for an email security company called MessageLabs and we were the first company to do email security in the cloud, that was it. We call them towers, but they were just data centers all over the globe, scanning email on behalf of our clients in the cloud so that the viruses didn’t get to your network. So it was revolutionary at the time and this is around 2001, 2002, 2003. So that software as a service came first and then you had the infrastructure. Okay, now I can automate my infrastructure, my hardware, my operating system. And then, now you’ve got these platforms as a service, database as a service, even any kind of platform where it’s software development tools-

Steve Sidwell:

So all of this stuff-

Colin Gribbin:

… to be delivered just to expedite the process.

Steve Sidwell:

That’s awesome. I’m sorry, I totally didn’t mean to interrupt you there.

Colin Gribbin:

No, no.

Steve Sidwell:

I was jumping ahead to the next thing that I’m thinking about. Which I feel like this has transformed so much, the way that we’re able to do work and the type of markets that just keep opening up through this type of thing. When you look at just really, really fantastic companies that, on the backend, are based on relatively elastic computing platforms like Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, or whatever. There’s so much there, I feel like it’s transformed the way that we are doing a lot of these different types of businesses, in that you’re able to scale these things as much as you can think about them. And it really convinces you to think a little bit further ahead, as opposed to saying like, “All right, well, I’ve got this one box and how big can I build this? How big can I make this company?” When you start thinking about, I’ve got an idea for a company and I will, as long as I can grow it in my mind, I can just throw the tech at it. And it will automatically grow.

Colin Gribbin:

You hit the nail right on the head because this allows people to build, be creative, focus on your application. Stop worrying about all the very complicated things that go into hosting that. All the computers, all the hardware, all the software that goes into building out that infrastructure, stop worrying about that. Be a developer, be a builder, be an architect, build your application, hone your application, and let somebody else do the rest. And that’s where I come into play, that’s how I help my clients obviously, go to market much faster, be more agile, be more profitable. Be more cost-effective because you’re not paying… You need an army of people. For a business, 80% of their costs come from payroll, from employees. So if you don’t have to hire all these system admins to manage hardware that really has nothing to do with your business, but in the past was necessary even in order to compete. Or to deliver an application to the market, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Steve Sidwell:

It’s akin to the WeWork philosophy-

Colin Gribbin:

Exactly.

Steve Sidwell:

Or renting space in a building as opposed to going out and buying land and building a building. You could just lease it and then you can get to work.

Colin Gribbin:

And we see that-

Steve Sidwell:

I think getting to work is such a big part, that’s such a big driver for this whole thing.

Colin Gribbin:

You know what the big-

Steve Sidwell:

It just makes it easier to just actually do what you want to do when you have the idea.

Colin Gribbin:

To your point, even the big financials, the big banks are saying, “You know what? I don’t want to own and operate my own data center. You guys do this for a living. All right, now it’s been hard for us to do this because we’re the big banks and we got the money. And we can build our own data centers to our spec.” Those data centers get old. After five years, you got to do a refresh and that’s very expensive. But there’s been this trust level because of the level of service that’s being delivered. We’re delivering solutions to clients with 100% uptime SLA, latency guarantees, I think we talked about that. The speed is so important, latency kills. So even they’re coming around to, “I’ll put it in a third party data center. We’re still going to manage our hardware because we still have it and we have those resources. We have those sysadmins on staff, but I’m going to move away from owning my own brick and mortar data center.

Steve Sidwell:

Absolutely. Now when you’re talking about the service level guarantees for uptime and for network connectivity with these big companies, they’re not just nationwide. These are worldwide organizations where having things like localized data centers for both to be able to get the data quickly. But then also, I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons why you have to have data in country or whatever, for those providers. That said, internet connectivity varies a lot around just the East coast, let alone the nation and let alone the globe. How do you guys work through that kind of thing?

Colin Gribbin:

There’s lots of different things going out there now, and we used to call them tier one networks. You had the big, the AT&T’s, the Verizon’s, GTT, there’s been a tremendous amount of level three, a lot of consolidation in that market. What we’re delivering to our clients now is a blended bandwidth solution with a patented routing technology, so it’s pretty fantastic. You’re getting fastest internet connectivity than you’ve ever gotten before because latency kills. Who cares about that? E-commerce, they talk about if it takes an extra few seconds for that shopping cart to load, they might abandon and move on to somebody else who’s quicker. They don’t want to have timeouts, they don’t want to see the spinning wheel going, “Hey, what’s going on?”

Steve Sidwell:

Or that it might take not one time, but over the course of 10 or 50 or 1000 times, if it happens to 10 or 50 or 1000 people, slowly things start moving and migrating away. What is this, tell me more about this patented network blending technology? I think I messed up the order of the words because right now I’m thinking kind of a mixed drink of network. Where-

Network Blending Technology for Efficiency

Colin Gribbin:

That’s fine. What they’re coming out with now, look, and I consider myself a technology consultant. I’ve worked for a number of organizations throughout my career. The firm that I’m with right now, they’ve patented a routing technology that delivers the fastest connectivity. It determines every 90 seconds, it’s pinging 450,000 internet prefixes all around the globe saying, “Okay, I got 10 providers in my mix, or I got six providers in my mix. Who’s the fastest link to send your data to so it gets to the end customer the quickest possible way?”

Steve Sidwell:

So this is like Waze except it always works?

Colin Gribbin:

Exactly, that’s exactly it. It’s the difference between standard MapQuest or even Google Maps compared to Waze. It’s going to route around traffic, it’s going to understand the fastest route to deliver your data to the end user, and that’s so important to so many industries.

Steve Sidwell:

None of these, of course, being sponsors of The Tech Bench Podcast, just to insert that in there.

James Patrignelli:

When you mentioned those industries, are there any verticals that rely on the interconnectivity more than others?

Colin Gribbin:

Absolutely. Advertising technology, marketing technology, it’s huge. They’re doing real-time bidding, it’s like the financial markets and they need the fastest possible connectivity out there because somebody is willing to pay X number of dollars for this ad. Or how much X number of dollars per CPM, cost per thousand for ad impressions and you’re going to bid on it. Your engine, your machine, as an advertising technology, it’s going to bid on that and whoever bids on it the lowest, the fastest gets it because it’s all programmatic, it’s all automated. Just like our cloud computing is all automated and programmatic, you’ve got advertising tech. You’re not signing an insertion order, “I’ll take 20,000 impressions over the next three weeks.” It’s all automated these days. So the fastest one wins. What else? So advertising, marketing, gaming. Gaming is a huge thing, anybody heard of Fortnite?

So you’re playing with 10,000 of your closest friends around the world and you can’t have your gun stall, or whatever it is that you’re doing in that moment. Or else your character is no longer with us in the ether. So it’s important, those kind of industries. E-commerce, we talked a little bit about that. It’s got to be fast, it’s got to be quick, it’s got to be sharp. Financial services is obviously the big one, but any data sensitive, time sensitive applications.

Steve Sidwell:

I would imagine-

Colin Gribbin:

And it’s important, software downloads, even though you’re not doing so much of that. But anything has to be fast over the internet, like software as a service as we talked about, [crosstalk 00:19:51] platform as a service, it’s got to be delivered as if it’s on your computer. And that’s what the internet and the speeds that we get these days has allowed us to do.

Steve Sidwell:

Absolutely. When you mentioned the financial services, it made me think about one of the other huge parts that used to be, I would say probably to me personally, the most cumbersome of any type of server build out, deployment, had nothing to do with data center, disaster recovery. And so that’s going to be obviously, anything from just your basic file system backup to RAID, all the way through to tapes, to offsite, to how far back can we go. To replicating an entire data center in a different part of the world, to letting people get access to their data if you have to migrate that people who used to access it. This is a huge industry, I can’t imagine that this has not just reshaped that tremendously. Where do you guys come in on that? Tell me more about that.

Fighting for Disaster Recovery

Colin Gribbin:

That’s another piece of it that has definitely evolved quite a bit in the last even, again, in the last three or four or five years. Disaster recovery was always quite unfortunately, it was a nice to have because it was too expensive to have for most organizations. Right?

Steve Sidwell:

Oh sure.

Colin Gribbin:

I’ll give you an example, let’s take a modest internet hosting solution. Maybe it’s $10,000 a month for your infrastructure. Well, you want disaster recovery, it’s going to cost you another $10,000 a month. You’ve got to mirror your exact production environment, say not on the East coast, on the West coast or somewhere in the Midwest.

Steve Sidwell:

And this is just your basic data your basic data disaster recovery, effectively, a load balancing solution. That’s all that is, it’s just one-time recovery. That’s not… Even to me, that’s scary. And 10 grand a month, that’s not a big spend, we’re talking like one programmer.

Colin Gribbin:

There you go, yep. And so it was cost prohibitive for a lot of companies. Like disaster recovery backup, you’re just doing your backups. We progressed from tape backups to physical storage backups, offsite backups, you’ve got every kind of backup. So now you’ve got that as an option, as a cloud backup, so at least people are doing that for the most part. And we’re helping them do those solutions as well, backup as a service. So point your production environment, your data, your workflow, your applications, your images, and back them up offsite in the “cloud.” At least have that, and then people always talking about RPO and RTO, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Where do you need to recover from, what point, and when do you need to recover? Can you be down for three days? What would that do to your business per hour, per day? So that’s come a long way. We deliver solutions that help companies at a fraction of the cost.

It used to be double your production environment. Now we’ve got the technology and the automation to do that because we could spawn up your instance. You don’t have to be running it full time. You could have your backup target, your disaster recovery target, perhaps like a lot of my clients they’ll be in Secaucus. It’s a huge hub for data center services and infrastructure. You’ve got obviously Northern Virginia is a huge spot on the East coast as well, and then a lot of accounts are doing it in Dallas. Dallas is a good spot, it’s not prone to earthquakes, power is not that expensive there. You’ve got plenty of land and plenty of space, so that’s a big backup target for our clients. So the initial steps, at least backup offsite, but then you could have a disaster recovery solution that’s really working. There’s applications out there, there’s softwares out there that actually replicates all your data, all your workloads, all your applications, all your data into another facility.

Steve Sidwell:

Absolutely. Effectively, it’s a live snapshot of where you’re at and that can just be replaced over time. And just run in the background.

Colin Gribbin:

Exactly.

Steve Sidwell:

You don’t really have to worry about it that much. The way that the modern load balancing is taking care of these things, you could lose an instance and it’ll pick up an instance across the country. And the only thing now, how does it work with actual connectivity going through? Because obviously, if something goes down in Secaucus, you’re not going to be able to pick that up in Virginia at the same spot you were. But that said, if you have a lot going on, you’re balanced between the two of them anyway, so that you can set up that both actually know what’s going on with your major connections.

Colin Gribbin:

It’s literally as easy as pushing a button now. You’ve got a dashboard that says, “Okay, oops, disaster.” My Secaucus data center is out. I push a button in this software dashboard that fails over to the secondary site.

Steve Sidwell:

And you can virtualize the testing environment for that entire thing. So, you don’t have to actually have a disaster situation in order to test this. You can mock up the whole thing in sandbox and then bring it live.

Colin Gribbin:

No. In fact, as a consultant, I would be remiss. I would be doing my clients a great disservice if we didn’t test that every quarter, every six months, every year. Do a real hard live test every year, I know for sure. And then typically every quarter we’re doing soft fail overs and stuff like that to make sure it’s working because it has to, it doesn’t work. And then the hardest part that people never really talked about was then you got to fail back, the agony of that. So you fail over to the secondary site, how do you fail back to the primary?

Steve Sidwell:

Oh, of course.

Colin Gribbin:

Because you’ve got to replicate all the changes that have now happened in your secondary site back to your primary, and then turn that back up. So it’s come a long way. It used to be agonizing and now it’s not so hard anymore.

Steve Sidwell:

And with a completely cloud hosted situation and solution for that, I would imagine too, you’re not paying for the same type of hardware in both locations. You’re paying for the need for hardware.

Colin Gribbin:

Exactly.

Steve Sidwell:

You’re paying for a potential.

Colin Gribbin:

It’s on reserve. You’ve got all of the data and everything you need to spin it up, to spawn it. But then that hardware is on reserve, it’s dormant until you need it.

Steve Sidwell:

Exactly.

Colin Gribbin:

And that’s where the cost savings come in.

Steve Sidwell:

Your most recent version of the data can be stored on SSD, but the rest of it is stored somewhere in a relatively slow, what we used to call a WORM drive years ago. But a relatively slow back up and just to bring it back. You’re not paying for the hardware.

Colin Gribbin:

No, agreed.

Steve Sidwell:

I think that’s fantastic.

Colin Gribbin:

And I think that’s where most of… That’s been the most surgical approach to new projects that we’ve been doing and that I’ve been helping my clients out with because these are the numbers. 75% of companies do not have a valid disaster recovery strategy or policy in place. It won’t work, and it’s because it’s been cost prohibitive in the past. If you’ve got the money, you can have your active-active with your load balancing that you were talking about. Most companies can’t afford to do that in the case of a disaster. They just don’t have the budgets, but now you can do that and that’s been a major part of it.

So if there’s only 25% of the companies out there doing anything around it, there’s a huge need because it’s a very real risk. It’s a very costly risk to clients if they go down or they lose data, and then there’s compliance issues. You got HIPAA compliance, you got PCI DSS compliance, you got all these compliance regulations that require you to be up and running, delivering healthcare information across the global health network. Or whatever it is, financial information, credit card information, so it has to be done. So it’s been a major part of what I’ve been doing to help my clients.

Disaster Recovery Under GDPR

Steve Sidwell:

I’m sure. I would imagine that doing a lot of business around the country and around the world, we talk about this all the time, but GDPR is still changing the face of all of this type of thing. Is there anything in there that you feel we’re missing out on and still haven’t really looked at yet? You’ll see these situations where if I have a right to be forgotten, do I have a right to be forgotten just here in the one instance that’s live, across all of my backups, across my DR solutions? How far back in can thing really go?

Colin Gribbin:

It’s complicated in the outlook.

Steve Sidwell:

It’s like threading a needle in reverse.

Colin Gribbin:

Yeah, it’s complicated and it’s still fleshing out like anything else. Any new compliance regulation, it’s still working through the kinks but companies are delivering just isolated instances, just to meet those requirements.

Steve Sidwell:

Oh, absolutely.

Colin Gribbin:

So that doesn’t touch anything else. So that traffic, that data, that information never traverses outside of the European Union.

Steve Sidwell:

That’s great. That’s great. So listen, James, is there… I know that we have been through a number of things today and as I always do, I end up hogging the mic.

Colin Gribbin:

[crosstalk 00:28:36] Steve-

Cloud Hosting Creates New Tech Hubs

James Patrignelli:

It’s quite all right. No, it’s just I’m wondering. So obviously you mentioned that you have a lot of clients in Secaucus now with the speed at which you’re able to provide connectivity with the DR cloud. Is this changing the geography of how people can do business, a little bit more flexible throughout the country and globe?

Colin Gribbin:

For sure, I’ll give you an example. It doesn’t really matter where it is anymore. It matters about the quality of service, and it matters that you’re meeting the SLAs that you’re promising to deliver to your clients. It’s not even a factor so much. I could put clients in Chicago, Dallas, Santa Clara, LA, Virginia, Secaucus, it doesn’t really matter. They want to make sure that they’re getting a robust solution that gives them that 100% uptime guarantee, that gives them those latency requirements.

James Patrignelli:

I think that’s spawning a lot of technology hubs. Maybe 20 years ago, you wouldn’t see Austin be Austin the way it is. It’s a technology hub and everybody’s moving away from the, you have to be outside of New York, you have to be outside Chicago platform.

Colin Gribbin:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I’ve always loved about the internet, it’s a democratization of everything. Of services, of solutions, of development talent going back to being builders, being creative. Creating a great product that you can deliver from anywhere in the world.

Steve Sidwell:

Absolutely.

James Patrignelli:

And speaking of creativity, I want to hit you with this one in 30 seconds, Beatles or Rolling Stones?

Colin Gribbin:

My father is going to hate me for this one. I love them both dearly, The Rolling Stones were always the bad boys of rock in the sixties, my dad was a Rolling Stones guy, but I think even he’s come around. They’re both great, but The Beatles just consistently never go out of rotation for me. They just never do, there was just so much there. So much value, it’s a lot of fun. I’m almost having a second childhood because I’m playing a lot lately and I’ve got three young ones who are interested in music, which is music to my ears. My daughter wants a drum kit. So I’m playing a lot of The Beatles stuff on the piano and I’m not a very good piano player, but I’m forcing myself to learn these things. And it’s so much fun, so I have to go with The Beatles, with The Stones as a close second.

Steve Sidwell:

Colin, thank you so much for coming on The Tech Bench Podcast today.

Colin Gribbin:

Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure.

Steve Sidwell:

We really appreciate it. James and I both enjoyed talking with you so much, even though I did my constant thing which is hogging the mic. James, I just want to say thank you too, because I never thank my co-host and I feel like that’s so rude of me.

James Patrignelli:

Steve, it’s been a pleasure. Colin, always great talking to you. Thank you.

Colin Gribbin:

Thank you, a pleasure. Take care.

Steve Sidwell:

Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Tech Bench Podcast. On our next episode, we’ll be speaking to Damien Howard, the senior vice president of social ventures at Per Scholas. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to subscribe and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @LTTBPodcast. If you have any questions, comments, or show ideas, please feel free to email us at techbench@liquidtechnology.net. For show notes, visit liquidtechnology.net/techbench.