Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak

In this digital age, there is a lot of technological change. Whether you're looking to sell, deciding who to market to, determining how to market, or considering technological advances and employment, all of these challenges can have technological solutions. So, what can you do with all this technology? In this episode, I have Ryan Pollyniak, Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. We talk about cloud transformation, cloud computing, and data management. Ryan emphasizes how important it is to select the right technology solutions that can accommodate future growth and align with a long-term strategic roadmap. Additionally, we discuss the impact of AI on employment and its usefulness during the interview process. Listen and explore cloud transformation now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there’s a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change, and many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering, “What can I do with all this technology?” And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you’re looking into, whether you’re looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market, and what are you going to use. So, to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances, and technological change in employment, even, for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive. --- Ryan, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen. Glad to be on. Well, thank you for joining and, first of all, take us through a day to day. What’s a normal activity for someone who’s a cloud transformation executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives but this particular one is very specific to our time, being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations. Absolutely, and so if you ask my seven-year-old’s third grade class when she told them that I was a cloud transformation executive, they all think I’m a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually, working with companies, all different sizes of companies, small businesses all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses, make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, have their old, legacy, on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud and there’s so many things that go along with that, from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch and then you’ve also got startups, of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they’re setting themselves up for the future. So, what I’m doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to kind of realize the vision that we set. So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone’s not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers, probably think that their data just kind of floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So, what does the cloud actually mean? What is it? That’s a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general, cloud is computing power servers that are not in the server on premise, in your office, in your server closet, in your back office. It is having your data really in a remote location and then accessing it over the Internet, whether that’s through a VPN or some other method. Now, clouds, they’re different. Let’s say you have a business system on a physical server in your back office. Many companies want to make that move to the cloud so they don’t have to manage that server, so they don’t have to do updates and manage performance and everything else. Well, you could pay a company or you could even do it yourself in something like Azure or AWS, Amazon Web Services, and you could move that whole application, that server, into the cloud, in what’s called a private cloud at that point. That’s kind of the middle of the road. You no longer have a server in your back office but it’s still your server, just virtualized, if that makes sense. And it’s got some pluses. You don’t have to manage it anymore, assuming that you have someone doing it for you. Now, you could also have your own internal IT team just get rid of the physical machine and put that in a cloud instance and then they still do have to manage it for you. Far end of the spectrum, software as a service, SaaS. Everyone’s heard that term or a lot of folks have if you’re in the IT space, even peripherally. So what that means is you’re no longer taking Acme Company server and putting it in a cloud, you are actually subscribing to a service from a Microsoft or a NetSuite or a Salesforce and that organization is managing everything up to and including delivering that application to you via a web browser or an app on your phone or tablet and that’s all that you’re doing is subscribing to that software literally as a service. So there’s a nuance there. It’s not the same thing as just putting your server in the cloud. So, in general, it’s getting away from the physical servers but there are varying degrees of that.Share on X And you talked about working with both anywhere from startups to larger enterprises and some of them are kind of older enterprises or enterprises that had been around for a long time. This transformation going on, what people refer to as digital transformation, do you feel like it’s more challenging for companies that have a long history and maybe have a lot of data in other places or more challenging for that startup that’s just starting up now that now needs to figure out what they want to do but don’t have a history of where they’d put their data for six decades? I think the established companies got a bigger lift because, depending on how you grew up, and this is a lesson for the startups, depending on how you started, you want to make sure to be forward thinking. How is my organization going to grow? What are my needs going to be in three years, five years, seven years, not just how do I most cost efficiently manage my data processing needs here at the moment. And so companies that have grown up with disparate data sources in various on-premise applications, there’s a bigger lift there because you’ve got to find a way to bring that all together. And so what I mean by that is, let’s say you’ve got, like you said, six decades’ or two decades’ worth of data in an old system and then you’re saying, “Well, I wanna move to a new SaaS application, a modern, cloud-based application, and let Microsoft manage it for me.” Well, what happens then is you’re not going to bring all of that history into your new system, and that is best practice in the European industry, accounting system industry. You’re not going to take all of your data from an old on-premise system into a new system. The structure is different. It’s very risky, it’s very costly. You don’t want to do it. So what ends up happening is, then, when you’ve got all this data in the old system. What happens if I need to look up a transaction? What happens if I need to compare data year over year, like sales trend analysis? How is this product sold in 2024 compared to what it did in 2008? Take your pick. And so if you’re going to gain those kind of insights from your data and your data is a huge asset and the value of good data is increasing exponentially because of AI which needs good data if it’s going to make any sense of what you’re trying to do, so what you end up needing to do then is to create a unified data model, which is totally doable in today’s day and age and there are all kinds of organizations that have tools to do this where you’re going to take all of that old data from your old systems and you’re going to put it in a cloud-based data warehouse and you’re going to map everything together. You’re going to bring data in from your new production system to mirror that and to create what’s called a unified data model and then you can drive your reporting off of that. So, to go back to your question, that is a bigger lift than being a green field startup with the world in front of you and saying, “Well, how do you wanna manage your data from the ground up?” that’s a little bit of an easier lift because the modern tools are going to be better equipped to handle that stuff out of the gate. And when you work with people, whether they be startups or people with like, say, smaller businesses as they’re selecting solutions, you talked about being forward looking. Is there ever a situation where you will advise a client to implement a solution that’s expedient for the here and now just to accomplish a certain task knowing that, later on, they’re going to have to make a transformation between one of your three categories of solutions because of what happens when the business potentially or likely scales up? First of all, you have to select a system that’s going to allow your business to scale. I’ve seen many times where there are very early stages of a startup where decisions are made to get into a system because of the cost point and then there’s not a roadmap in terms of strategy there....