Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
Hey guys, welcome to the podcast today and I've got Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Digital, tech company. He hails from Michigan and I'm really excited to have him on the show, especially in times of this with rapid technological change, AI, and I'm really excited to dive into the conversation. So Greg, welcome.
Greg Williams:
Great, thanks for having me today. I am excited to be here and talk with you.
Speaker 3:
So Greg, welcome to the podcast.
Greg Williams:
Yeah, thanks for having me today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I know your story, briefly introduce yourself and talk about your journey, your story, very briefly and I'm excited to dive into the conversation.
Greg Williams:
So I have spent my entire career, the last 25 years, helping companies scale with technology. We often start with companies that are outgrowing that initial kind of QuickBooks style system and they want to get to a true financial system that also has supply chain management and operations capabilities and have helped them take the next level and next step in their business to scale the business.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, interesting. So very interesting background, and so one thing is talking about is I know Western Computer, talk about what it does and what products and services, how does it compare with Microsoft and all the Dell?
Greg Williams:
So we are a Microsoft partner and we focus on Microsoft's business systems, which Microsoft calls Dynamics 365, and that is a suite of applications that encompasses customer relationship management and customer engagement. For example, there's call center applications and service applications. Then there are applications for accounting and warehousing and supply chain management and really everything that you may need to run your business. It's a several billion a year business for Microsoft, but as you can imagine, it's still a small part of Microsoft because they're such a big company.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's a really great segue into what I was going to talk about is a day-to-day I want to talk about, can you share specific ways that Microsoft Dynamics helps small to mid-sized businesses improve their daily operations?
Greg Williams:
Yes. So generally it's an inflection point when the company needs to start scaling to a higher turnover or a higher revenue number or maybe they want to bring on some investors and they need financials that are audited, and typically whoever's going to invest in you, they want to know that you have good data and good processes and good software so they can trust the financial reports that they get from you. So we will often brought into those types of situations. Let's say a company has a great idea and they're doing about $5 million a year in revenue on it, which is enough to make a living, but you may not retire off that size business. A lot of companies say, "Hey, I want to take this to the next level, but I need the right tools to do that." And we can come in and help you with those tools, whether they're financial systems, supply chain systems, inventory handling, customer outreach, we can help you with all those tools to take your business to the next level.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. There's a lot of need for what you're doing, especially in the tech sector. And so one thing is that's talked about all these days is data. And so the companies that leverage real-time data for decision-making and how does your company use real-time data to make informed decisions, enhance productivity, and provide examples of companies benefiting?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. A lot of this is not just setting up software for people, but consulting on best practices and business and helping them set up the right structures. We have a data team that works on setting up reports and dashboards for our customers, but really it's defining upfront what are the key performance indicators that you need to measure for your business? And how do we make those easy to attain so you can take action on them? And so we will often work backwards from what are the key performance reports that you need for your business? We'll define those first and then we'll work backwards to set up the systems and the reports to provide visibility to that.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. The next question I have for you is, because you do a lot of B2B and also a supply chain management, and with vendor selection what steps can businesses take to mitigate risk with vendor selection, especially like software or supply chain management?
Greg Williams:
So when it comes to software selections and buying software apps to run your business, it's very tempting at first to want to choose what I call point applications that fit one part of your business and give you some benefits and it's also some relief from, but as you scale, you can find yourself having 10 different business applications from different providers and now you have to manage 10 vendors, 10 software contracts, and those applications may or may not talk to each other very well.
So one of the things we offer as a Microsoft partner is really all your core applications coming from the same provider. So you have Microsoft Office which everyone uses. You have Microsoft Windows, which is still the leading market share in terms of operating systems out there. And then you can have your back office systems for your business, your accounting and supply chain systems that run on that same platform.
And there's a lot of benefits to that. One is just centralizing your license spend in one place and Microsoft will often provide discounts if you buy multiple products from them. And then the other one is just the lack of finger pointing. So if you've ever run a software application before, you can get things that are like, "Oh, you can't do that in a software and you entered a support request, we determine that's an issue with Microsoft Windows." Or, "We determine that's an issue with Google Chrome and that's why you're having the issue." With Microsoft they can't do that. Everything comes from the same vendor, so you're guaranteed support to get these things working.
The other thing is just with the massive market share they have, it's easier to find people that know these applications. So let's say that your accountant quits because someone else offers them more money or they move to another city or something like that and you need to hire a new accountant. It's pretty easy to find an accountant that knows Microsoft Dynamics as opposed to finding an accountant that knows some obscure software that you chose because it's a little less expensive
Speaker 3:
Like I said, it's really interesting because you mentioned the Microsoft, and further down into the conversation, I want to talk to you how your company approaches competition from faster, more nimble startups, but remote working, cloud technology, and sounds with after Covid, you've embraced remote work, you got good work-life balance.
Greg Williams:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And so how can businesses leverage cloud technology while adopting this remote hybrid work model?
Greg Williams:
It's a great question. It's very interesting, as a company, we've been almost fully virtual for 15 years. So COVID was a non-event for us in that way. We were already all set up to work from home and ready to go. Cloud applications make that a lot easier because you don't have to have a remote desktop, you don't have the VPN, you don't need any software installed locally. So our customers that were cloud-based, that already made the jump to the cloud when the pandemic hit, they just had business as usual.
But the ones that were still running older applications, they really had a couple months of disruption because everyone needed webcams and laptops and they weren't used to all that stuff and they had to get all that deployed so people could work from home, as well as set up the VPNs or the remote desktop servers to access the applications. That was a major moment for cloud computing in our business. A lot of the cloud applications, actually most software applications had already moved to the cloud and accounting software was the last holdout. It was the last one that wasn't cloud based. And the pandemic really pushed that over towards where now that's leading with cloud-based software as well.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. The next question I have for you is cyber security is really a burgeoning field, especially with cloud. And so how is your company positioned, because if you have all your data in one area, you have a single point of failure, so talk about your, you don't have to, but just how you approach it?
Greg Williams:
So the way that we approach it is going with a public cloud like Microsoft or Amazon as the way to go because they have military-grade level security, they do co-locate your data in multiple geographic regions, and they give you a service level where they guarantee your data is safe. A few years ago we were running into many small business owners that thought the cloud was less secure than their own server, but I was like, Just because you can see that server in the closet down the hall from your office does not mean it's secure. Someone could still be hacking that data in there." And we've seen many cases of that. We probably see five or six cases a year where one of our legacy customers or someone that comes to us that was on-premise gets their data held ransom by a hacking group.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, there was recently, there's been UnitedHealth and MD Anderson got hacked and a lot of healthcare systems, especially with patient data, lots of points of failure. Moving on to AI, which is really a force in and of itself, how is your company viewing AI, how is it preparing, how's it going to affect B2B sales and supply chain? And what are innovations on the horizon?
Greg Williams:
Sure. As you probably know, Microsoft has made a huge investment in AI. They're spending tens of billions of dollars on R&D for it right now, starting with their investment in OpenAI. What they're doing is making sure that AI is secure. If you use any of Microsoft's Copilot tools, it's guaranteed that the data that you exchange with Copilot does not get used to train their models. It's private to your tenant. So if you think about, let's say you were doing some type of pharmaceutical research and you go out to ChatGPT and start using that to analyze your data, the data's being shared. They may anonymize it, but it's being shared in their model, and your research could be used by someone else. With Microsoft's Copilot tool, it's private. So that's the first thing that we really like about our approach with Microsoft.
And then Microsoft has already infused our products with AI. So one task that an accountant does is a bank reconciliation. And if you ever balance your checkbook, that's you go through every item and you match it up with making sure that it matches what you had as a purchase or what you had on the invoice. And there are certain things that don't match and you have to research them. Now with AI it does that research for you and automatically matches everything.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. It's really another corollary to that idea is technological innovation is exponential so it gets faster and faster. And you've seen, for example, companies like Cisco or Intel and they've had to battle these more nimble startups that are extremely disruptive, they're very quick. So how is your company approaching very disruptive technology, disruptive companies just coming in against, because you're an established corporation, so you're a little bit more ossified.
Greg Williams:
I think that we're a little insulated from that because our products are so big and wide-ranging and have 30 years of development behind them. So there's a barrier to entry just in terms of how much work you'd have to do to launch a new business system product. So most of our competitors are the traditional IT companies, Oracle, SAP, Sage. That's most of our competition. We rarely run into a startup. But what's interesting is that our system has a catalog of third-party apps that work alongside us. So one of our systems has a catalog of over 5,000 apps that you could plug in. Think about apps through your iPhone, same thing through your business system. So a lot of times we're able to harness those new disruptors because they publish themselves in our catalog as an add-on.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. It's interesting, your response reminded me of Meta when basically it gobbled up Instagram and WhatsApp, and when Snapchat came out with stories, they just incorporated it in because it had first mover advantage. Which brings us to our question, acquisition strategies for business growth, and what ways can a company use acquisitions to expand and also enhance its supply chain operations?
Greg Williams:
Sure. I'm not an expert in acquisitions, but I've been around several of them over the years, and I think there's a few ways that companies approach acquisitions. Obviously, I always want to make sure that there's sound financials and that they make sense financially. You also are sometimes getting a customer base and some recurring revenue onto that. Or a lot of times you're looking for acquisitions that haven't had the, companies that haven't had the ability to invest in their business, but they have potential. And those are great targets as well. But it really does come down to analyzing the financials and making sure that they're sound financials and then basing the purchase price based upon that.
Speaker 3:
Interesting. How can people find out more about you and reach out to you and see the work that you do?
Greg Williams:
Sure. So the best place is probably LinkedIn. Search for Greg Williams at Western Computer on LinkedIn. And that's a Microsoft product, so we're always out there and always collaborating with people there. The other place would be Westercomputer.com, where you can learn more about the products and services that we offer.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, really interesting conversation and be sure follow Greg's socials and connect with him and find out more about what he does. And thanks so much for coming on.
Greg Williams:
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
