[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Welcome to Ever Changing Technology, where we explore the innovations shaping our world and how they impact our lives.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Jim?
[00:00:26] Speaker B: I'm your host, Jim Bradfield. Today we're joined by Michael Grimaldi, a savvy businessman and technology leader with over 30 years of business experience in government, Fortune 500 companies and the entertainment industry, including his time as the manager of worldwide WI fi infrastructure at Disney.
Michael has also developed his firm, 250 Cake Farms, where they grow ideas into solutions by providing a set of tools that companies integrate into their AI processes for IT management.
Michael, welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Thank you, Joe. It's great to be here.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yep.
And today we're going to explore how AI technologies are transforming information technology or IT management and, and what it means for you. So Michael will give us an overview of his background in technology evolution and what he's learned through working through the process of IT management.
So, Mike, give us a background on your experience in technology processes, you know, and explain what your experience taught you about how technology decisions were made, you know, from the top.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Yes.
Well, you know, I was very fortunate in growing up in the late 60s, early 70s when we were first, you know, transitioning from vacuum tube technology to transistor technology.
So I was able to learn, you know, from a very, you know, early age, you know, where, yeah, at first I wanted to be a dish jockey, you know, and run the world that way. But, you know, I got my third degree broadcast license, you know, so I could write down the power meter readings and actually adjust the transmitter, you know, because, you know, during the day they have to change different phases. And then. Anyway, so that was like my introduction to technology. And from that, you know, I started working in the industry and, you know, fixing circuit boards and then deploying computer networks and then, you know, larger and larger and larger networks. And as the networks got more larger and more complex, you know, it became obvious that, that there needed to be a standard way of approaching them. And through that, you know, that was what the ITIL foundation is a British organization.
That was their goal. They came up with this way of organizing your computer network and your computer network services in a way that would ensure that only the people that you wanted to have access to your network actually had access. Keep bad actors out. And so security is always a very big part of it.
And through those, you know, like, what you find out is that, you know, there's two realities in technology.
You know, there's the reality of making the deal, you know, who's actually going to supply the hardware and the software and the support and all the money that comes along with that, you know, and, you know, how is that done? Fairly and above the board, you know, transparently, you know, and that's always been like what we call the layer eight issues, you know, because all the technology is built on a standard so that it should be theoretically interoperable. But each manufacturer has their own specific bells and whistles, you know, or features, you know, that they provide that others don't. And that's the reason, you know, why they're in the market, you know, because they have benefits that other companies don't offer.
So but sometimes those get conflated, you know, and the words that they use to describe them, they don't go into great detail about, you know, exactly what are the, you know, minor points, you know, which are seem minor at the deal side, you know, when you're talking about, you know, millions of dollars and years of contracts, you know, it's really kind of a, you know, it's a very minuscule, you know, point, but it's very important for the IT manager because that's basically the basis of why you get, you know, so many incorrect error messages.
And that's what we do at 250k farm is we help you sort through all of those error messages that really are not exactly what they appear to be. And, you know, that's the things that we teach and we provide different tools and things for, you know, for companies to do that.
So co creating value, you know, holistic approach on incorporating all your modern methodologies into your network maintenance.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Wow, that's pretty impressive. Now, you know, everybody in technology has heard of the OSI seven layer model for it, obviously, but can you explain what you're referring to as layer eight?
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Yes, layer eight. You know, layer eight is the golf course, right? Is the, like I said, it's the deal making part of it, you know, because there's, there's always two sides to it. You know, there's, you know, there's the purest techno technocrat, you know, that wants to get, you know, they put together a scope, you know, or specification, you know, document, you know, and they want to be very particular about it and they want to be exact, you know, and then there's the deal side where it's like, yeah, but you know, this company is offering a better, you know, more product for less money, you know, even though it may not be the same. So they say, so they come to the technologist and they say, well, do you really have to have this? Can you sacrifice this?
You Know, can you sacrifice that?
You know, it's in such an abstract that, you know, basically the technologist is just left with, you know, the best that they can get and they got to make it work somehow.
Yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: And. And that's where you come in. Right. So.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Right. And people like me, I mean, I'm not the only one that does this, of course, but, you know. Yeah, so.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: So the.
Can you tell us a little bit about. I, I know, by the way, you know, I didn't introduce Mike all that. All that well, but I've known him for, you know, 20 plus years and we've worked together and, you know, Mike and I have a lot of things that we've done together over the many years. But. But can you tell us about the first Fortune 500 company where you learned the brutal truth about how technology decisions are really made?
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that was fun.
Like I said, when I started, everything was in transition at that time, and there was no set way of doing anything. And the first Fortune 500 company I was hired into was hired in to be an assistant to the architect that was, you know, creating their transition, you know, from non computer to a computer company.
And so the director comes and introduces me and tells, you know, here I got this great guy to help you out. All your problems are solved. And he, he walks out of the room and says, yeah, this is going to be great. And the guy looks at me and he says, number one, whatever management says, only believe half of it.
You know, whatever they promise, you know, we just have to live up to it. So he was, he's like a real practical, you know, kind of guy, you know, people like him, you know, that I was very fortunate. I had like, probably five or six really good mentors, you know, and mentoring is really the way. Yeah. You know, you can really, you know, but you need people to have good humor, you know, that do it, you know, because it's a tough, tough industry, you know, so you can't really take everything personal.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Yeah, a mentor is a really big deal. And that's one of the things we want to make sure that the younger guys understand that too. You know, anybody's looking in that's going to be, you know, kind of really starting out. They've got to make sure they find a good mentor. And, you know, Michael is an absolutely awesome guy because he's got so much experience. I have a lot of experience in that, too. So tell us a little bit about with that experience that you developed, how you managed at Disney and how you approached you Know, working with all the other groups within Disney.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah, so again, yeah, that's where you kind of go back to the itil, you know, because these guys really thought about it deeply and you know, if you go through and you read this and you, you don't have to become an expert at it, but you just have to have a good general understanding of the processes that you need to go through. And it develops a, you know, a lot of leadership skills, but also develops a lot of team building opportunities.
Because the different pillars, you know, basically the difference between WI FI architecture and all the other architecture disciplines, you know, the pillars of the technologies is that they only have to focus on one thing. Like security focuses on RADIUS and active directory and then, you know, transport, you know, they worry about routing, switching and multicasting, you know, but you know, the WI FI guy, he has to worry about both security and multicasting, you know, so you have to know, you know, the whole parallel of all of them and to get them to interact with each other because they all have their own, you know, domains and their own, you know, avenues of responsibility as well as reporting. You know, they usually don't report up to the same person until you get up to maybe the VP level or, you know, the CIO level.
You know, so there's, there's not a lot of motive for them to work together.
And so, so really what I found is, you know, using the ITIL processes in a lab environment is, you know, like, kind of like the best way. It's kind of like a boy scouts approach or, you know, type, you know, approach to the technology. You know, where you can get together, have like, you know, your little boot camps together and teach each other about their different parallels and then also, you know, show how your architecture is going to apply to fixing the company's issues.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, so let's, let's talk about that real quick.
How do you basically explain the ITIL standard and working on the, you know, it's a real challenge collaborating with all these other teams. So how do you put that into perspective for everyone?
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that, that's definitely the, the challenge there because like I said, everyone has their different motives and things and you know, and you know, that's where the real issues of the technology get involved. And it's, you know, it's up to the integrity of the individuals that, that are doing it. You know, it's not like, you know, everything works perfectly the first time. You know, you have to stay diligent, you know, and know that, you know, you're going to stumble, you know, but you know, you just got to get back up. And, and that's why, you know, once you understand the process, because the process is that you develop an idea, you know, you develop a framework of a test, you know, or, you know, validation of your idea, you know, and then you feed back in, you know, you figure out, you know, what worked and what didn't work and then, you know, continuously improve. You know, that's, that's the primary thing about ITIL is a continuous improvement program. Just like your computer network is going to be an evolution of. You know, I started here with this idea and then they bought this other company so we had to bring them in. They had a little bit different infrastructure than we did, so we kind of glued them together, you know, and that's the way that the computer network has grown now. You, this gives you an opportunity and you know, with the new, when you're deploying new technologies like Wi Fi 7, Wi Fi 8, you know, this gives you an opportunity to kind of restructure the entire network into a new framework, you know, so you can build and migrate rather than just do wholesale changes.
Because without a process, you know, what you end up doing is you just build a whole brand new thing and then you switch everybody over in one day, you know, and then you deal with all the issues that come up after that, you know, but with the ITIL process, you actually build, test, slightly deploy and then work out the issues and then, you know, increase your deployments as you're issues outside, you know, so it's much more intelligent way of maintaining your computer network.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah, and as part of that, you're going to be talking to us later on about working with AI in this kind of feature and function.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Right?
Right. Yes, because incorporating those processes and procedures, you know, because AI doesn't know anything when it starts out. Right. You have to teach it everything.
And so, you know, really understanding, you know, all the layers of technology and all the pillars of technology, you know, is very important as you go through and, you know, build your AI model.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: So, so up next, what we're going to do is we're going to dive deeper into what 250k Farms has done to put this ITIL into practice so that we can understand it clearly and everybody is able to understand how to get a hold of you and use it.
And we're back. I'm Jim Bradfield and this is Ever Changing Technology here on NOW Media Television.
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All right, so we're here with Michael Grimaldi, and in this segment, we're going to be focusing on how Mike used ITL at Disney to influence the outcomes of all the OSI model pillars worldwide to provide a unified user experience and the lessons he learned from that process that led Mike to develop 250k farms. So the burning question really is how to build bridges between the pillars and ensure all technology teams work well together instead of having just a major fight and a, you know, like a sword fight in the field.
So, Mike, what are the biggest hurdles involved in getting these technology pillars to work together?
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Yes, well, first, I would say it's more like a fight of daggers than it is a fight.
There's a lot more backstabbing that goes on.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Goodness.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: But all right, you know, that's the, that's the world of corporate. Yeah. And that's what I mean about people having different agendas. And, you know, that's always part of human, you know, human nature has nothing to do with Disney or any other, you know, company myself. More of a human nature question. But.
And, you know, you could say that I've done a lot of work in the entertainment industry over the years. I used to live in, you know, Florida. Then I moved to Southern California as a young adult, and I stayed there until I got pretty old, and then I moved away.
And, you know, in Hollywood, they have a saying, you know, you fake it until you make it. And, you know, and that has kind of come into today's, you know, business technology as strategic communication, you know, meaning, you know, you just tell them what you want them to know or, you know, or you put, you use words that, you know, that somehow, you know, don't exactly reveal the total situation.
And so when you use the itil methods, you know, you kind of expose that kind of stuff and you, you know, and you basically discourage people from pursuing those lines, you know, and the reason for that is because they're required to basically outline what is it that they're trying to achieve. You know, just basically like any other business, right.
And how are they going about it.
And then, you know, you use your peers to review these things and, you know, and help, you know, make suggestions for improvements. You know, then again, as I said, you bring them into the lab and then you expose them to other, you know, options and ideas, you know, that are industry standards, you know, what they call them, or best practices. There's many of them out there, you know, that solve specific problems. And that's the whole idea, is to get them out of their shell a little bit and get them exposed to other elements. Because each of the issues, you know, like I said, when you look at it from a WI FI perspective, you know, it's not just one thing you have to look at.
There's five things on every transaction that you have to look at. And, you know, by getting them exposed to that kind of helps them see how other people, you know, basically deal with their issues. And, you know, it's not like a magic formula that poof, you know, everything works perfectly. You know, it's. It's an ongoing process, you know, so a lot of it is investing in your people too. You know, you have to have good managers that are, you know, that are leaders, not followers.
But yeah, so basically on the itil and, you know, how you want to use that and, you know, how does that really, you know, again, help you is, you know, through the structure of it, you know, so it gives everybody a script basically to follow, you know, and over time, you know, you see that, you'll see that, you know, you know, and along with your mentorships too, you know, those are very important also, you know, because you need people to cross over.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess one of the things that I would be concerned about is in a really big company like that, you know, it's one thing to. To have three guys sitting at a table, right? And that, you know, that's all you are, the three IT team and a smaller company. But, but what do you, you know, on a giant worldwide presence, I mean, do you. Do you actually do training with people? I mean, how do you actually accomplish this?
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Well, like in Disney's case, you know, they would have different. They have service providers in different regions, you know, so that kind of helped a little bit because there's like three different entities to deal with, you know, so there's, you know, three sets of classes, three sets of, you know, activities, you know, to kind of duplicate to you know, to help with the worldwide part.
And there were a lot of business units because, you know, each business unit has its own IT group.
But, you know, and again, that's, you know, where you get into the processes and the, you know, the most important part of, you know, the process is the documentation of the process and presenting of that documentation, you know, has to be easy to understand and done, you know, more than once because you can't tell somebody, someone, expect them to remember it for the rest of their life.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be like talking to me, right?
[00:20:32] Speaker A: You're not going to remember or me. Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: So now let's transition a little bit to the 250k farms. And, you know, how did all that experience help to develop those tools that you have now that you offer today?
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah, because, yeah, because over the years, you know, what I found is exactly that. What causes false alarms?
Why do devices always generate false alarms? Because it's not just any one device, it's all devices all through this.
And it's because they don't really know what the issue is. All they know is what happened, you know, they don't know why it happened. You know, and that's, you know, one of the things about AI. You know, AI is very good at pattern matching, you know, and telling you that, you know, when it sees, you know, one thing, you know, 87% of the time something else it sees and 13% of the time it sees this other thing, 0.3% of the time it sees a whole bunch of things, you know, but it doesn't really understand exactly what it sees. It just knows that, you know, that when there's a action, there's a very predictable reaction, you know, or fairly predictable reaction, you know, depending on, you know, some, some things are a thousand percent right, it always happens. And other things are, you know, less so, you know, using, you know, some of these AI, you know, techniques along with, you know, the tricks and tips and tricks, you know, that I've learned over the years of, you know, how to adjust the equipment to make it, you know, say something different and kind of squeal slightly different. You know, it helps you determine where exactly the issue is coming from.
So by combining those things together is the, you know, the tools that we provide to people.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so now, you know, when deploying AI and working with those tools, you've got to have a good start though, right? You can't just have a mess and then throw AI at it and hope that that's going to fix it. So basically what you're, what you have to do is make sure that you have a good base, that everything is actually working, that the start is working, that the finish is going to work even better because of AI, Right?
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: So you've got to be able to apply the correct.
So doing everything up front is really the most important thing to start with.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Right?
Yeah. Your audio is cutting in and out.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Sorry. Keep going.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Okay. All right.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: So the applying this to AI, the most important thing is making sure that you do this, you know, perfectly from the start. So you need to make sure that the base is working. Because if you don't have a good base and you have good process and procedure and everything else is correct, then you're just going to have AI multiply mistakes. Isn't that right?
So Mike, you know, with all the experience that you had working with all these different tools and everything and everything that 250k farms offers today, you know, and you worked with AI having to try to figure out what actually was going to make something work really well. You have to have a great base to start with. Right. You can't just have a massive mess and then make a. Try to make AI improve that.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Right, Right. So what my approach is is that I start with building the small tools first, you know, because one thing that you know that you're going to have to develop as you do your AI is all the interfaces to various programs that you want to interact with.
You know, like in IT management, you know, you have a, some kind of ticket tracking, tracking system, you know, where people put in requests for services or you know, incidences of failures or, you know, things like that.
And you know, so that's one thing that you're going to have to interface in. And then, you know, there's a process that you have to go through when someone, you know, reports an issue, you know, certain things have to happen. So all that process has to be programmed in. And those are little itsy bitsy steps. Like if you think about, you know, like your arm moving, you know, it's not just one motion, it's move, move, move, move, you know, and those are the.
As it comes to the computer network in particular, you know, there's going to be a lot of things that you're going to develop that are specific to certain things. You know, like your WAN circuits are going to be a different program than what you're going to create for your Ethernet circuits. You know, what you're going to create for your access point trunks, you know, or your switch up link trunks. You know, there's, there's a bunch of different categories that you're going to go through and define and then you're going to, you know, create a different process for each one.
But the beauty of all that is today that they have a lot of these tools out there that help you do this, you know, software development.
So you're not, you know, you don't have to be a programming expert, you know, to do it, but you do need a programming architect. You know, it's going to look at the overall security of the software, you know, how are the different modules going to communicate together, you know, what are the, you know, technologies and resources you're going to have available, you know, so it's a whole team effort. You know, it involves, you know, your, you know, the software side of your house as well as the hardware side of your house.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Yeah, excellent. And that's going to be something that you guys provide.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: Right, right. Because that's where the industry's at right now. That's the reason why things haven't really taken off like they thought. You know, the orchestration part has worked well and that's worked well when you're copying the existing configuration. But when you want to create a new configuration, like when you look at some of the Cisco products where you're actually providing an intent, you're trying to define the kind of, in a large nebulous how you want things to work. And then the computer is going to figure out the exact details for you need this device here and this device there, you know, this programming there and this programming there.
You know, so the whole thing is evolving in what people don't want is something that's going to go out and just haphazardly make changes to their computer network. You know, that's the absolute worst thing that you want, you know, so you need to make sure that everything follows a process and that process has to be built into your program and it's slightly different for each company. So, you know, while, yeah, we can build overall architecture, you know, that's universal to all devices and all companies, you know, each one has to be tailored to what's most important to that company.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Got it. Okay.
So, Michael, for viewers who want to learn more about your work and insights and everything and actually work with you, where can they connect with you online?
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, LinkedIn, you know, of course, is a good place in our
[email protected] you know, you're there, you'll find our contact information.
You know, you can call and schedule the appointment. We can get together for 15 minute call and find out how we can help each other out.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. And I do definitely recommend you guys do that because I've known Mike for a long, long time when we were both young and pretty back in the old days.
And I can tell you that he's one of the most amazing guys I've ever met in terms of technology.
We'll be right back. Coming up next, Mike shares lessons learned for deploying Wi Fi 7 in your network.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: And we're back. I'm Jim Bradfield and this is ever changing technology here on NOW Media Television.
And we're back with Mike Grimaldi and we're shifting gears to talk about a relatively new technology in the wireless world and how lessons learned we have been discussing apply to the deployment of Wi Fi 7. And by the way, just as a plug, there's going to be Wi Fi 8 coming out in 2028, at least that's what they say.
So the topic is now, how are we going to assure the awesome deployment of Wi Fi 7 in your network? That's what we want to discuss with the people. So Mike, how can we assure that awesome deployment in Wi Fi 7?
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Yeah, so this is where we're talking about the, where you don't want to just copy your old configuration, you really want to come up with a whole new configuration.
The reason for that is because Wi Fi 7 is two things. It's about efficiency and it's about security.
In order to take advantage of the security, you have to convert your network from WPA2 to PA3. Now I know this is a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo, but basically, yeah, there's a big difference. You know, it's like going from regular fuel to premium fuel, you know, yeah, the same engine will work, but you know, but the engine will get more horsepower.
And you know, you can't just take your old configuration and just apply it and you know, have it work because your old configuration is based on WPA too.
And so, you know, so this gives you, like I said, an advantage to be able to kind of rethink your network a little bit.
Especially like bigger network, you know, the bigger your network is, the more broadcast package in your network. And that's a bad thing, you know, and so, you know, the tenants or what you want to do is you want to, you know, divide up your network into macro and micro segmentation.
What that does, that first makes big pockets of users based on the commonalities and then smaller pockets within them based on their functionality.
What that does is that limits the number of devices that have to listen to each other's broadcasts. Basically, there's a lot of protocols out there, very talky. Like Microsoft, it wants to advertise everything in the world that your computer can do, even though you don't want it to do any of those things, you know, but it just doesn't anyway, you know, when you get a whole bunch of these things doing it, you know, then, then you have issues like, you know, some devices can't remember, you know, like us, you know, they remember like 64 things at a time.
You know, there's a, there's a thing called an art cache limitation on some devices where they can only remember 64 people's IP to Mac address, you know, association.
And then so if it sees more than those, it starts flushing them out and then it can't find the one that it wants, you know, for the host that it's supposed to be communicating to, you know, so it causes, you know, service interruptions and things like that.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, what we're going to be talking about the next go around is Wi Fi 8 and that's going to be coming up really soon. And that's going to do the ultra world reliable networking, which is going to allow multiple devices talking to multiple access points at a time and multiple APs talking to multiple APs at a time and that kind of thing. So we're going to hopefully make that more reliable and take care of that kind of problem you're just talking about.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's going to add a whole new set of interesting circumstances. Right, because now you're talking about access points that might be connected to different switches, might even be coming out of different IDFs, you know, that need to carry the same traffic within a microsecond of each other, you know, so it's gonna be.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: I'm glad I'm not the guy trying to figure that out with you. I mean.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Well, that shows the tools that. Yeah, so that shows that the tools that we have to step up, you know, and the problem, the industry today, you know, the tools that they have that do this kind of work are very expensive and they measure things down to, you know, to one, you know, to the negative 12th, you know, degree, you know, where we don't really need that at, you know, at the IT service level, you know, we need to be able to create scenarios that, you know, allow those underlying features to, you know, kick in and be able to measure the effectiveness of them, and then gather all that data together and present it back to the manufacturer so that they can, you know, make the adjustments, you know, because there's nothing we can do about it other than collect data and point out the obvious, you know, that we can find, you know, and visit all their other customers do that also. But, you know, with our tools, you know, you're going to be able to do it more elegantly and, you know, more detailed, you know, where you can actually, you know, because collecting all this information, you know, could take you a day, you know, a person, you're doing it manually, but, you know, with AI's help, you know, you'll be able to do it in a couple of hours.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, having, having talked about that, then, you know, how companies use the convergence of Wi Fi 7 and cellular to achieve their network and security operations objectives, you know, and you've got to, you've got to, you've got to be really careful about what you're doing.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Right, yeah. The advantage there is, you know, because all the devices accept sims now. So laptops, you know, except sims, you know, tablets, you know, cellular phones, of course, and you can use those sims, you know, in your cellular network, you know, so depending on the size of your company, you know, if you're a very big company, then you'll have a private, you know, section of a cellular network. But if you're a smaller company, you know, you'll use this for authentication of the devices and being able to set up those WPA3, you know, heavier encryption, you know, type connections, you know, automatically without the user, you know, really having to interact at all, you know.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: So that'll prevent, you know, bad actors from gaining access to your network, you know, so every device that has access to your network, you'll know exactly who it is and who, who it belongs to, you know, who should be logged into it, you know, so the upper layer security modules can also go to work. And, you know, because remember, this is just transport network, you know, we can't do everything at the transport layer, but we can do a lot and this really goes a long way.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: So, so how are you, you know, how are you facilitating that, you know, giving the aid to the companies and meeting these objectives and things like that and, and, and helping them avoid the biggest mistakes when deploying Wi Fi 7?
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah, the best way is, you know, well, first you have to start by reviewing, you know, what they have today and what their objectives are and then basically putting a presentation together, you know, to show them how you're going to help them transition, you know, identifying, you know, the correct technologies to deploy in the various, you know, areas.
You know, it's hard to say without giving away, you know, all of my secrets. You know, basically, yes, it's simplify but improve. And I say, and never, we don't ever promote changing from one to another and don't just cut over your hard cutovers. We don't believe in, you know, we always do, you know, soft transitions.
You know, as you look at, you know, like one of the things, you know, people always want to do is a site survey before they deploy, you know, a new technology. But it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because what you're really doing is you're recording what you already have today, not what you're going to have tomorrow, you know, and the chances of you reusing all the same locations that you have today is pretty slim, you know, because you're going to have new requirements. You know, not everybody needs the strongest Signal possible at 6 GHz in every square inch of their building.
You know, so, you know, if you take a more holistic approach to the overall system, you know, you know, solution that you're trying to provide, you know, you'll see that, you know, your best option is to, you know, build and migrate, not to try to, you know, monkey in what you already have. You know, just, you just end up with, you know, more issues down the road.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's understandable. I mean, and, you know, and that's really what's what the biggest problems are that you've got to call in professionals like yourself, like our group, you know, to make sure that we actually do the work for you to do the design correctly and actually make sure that everything's going to work. So, Mike, on the next one, we'll be talking about innovations in finding and addressing the false positives in the customers networks. Stay tuned.
Foreign.
And we're back. I'm Jim Bradfield and this is Ever Changing Technology here on NOW Media Television.
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So in our final segment, Michael Grimaldi, the president of 250K Farms, joins us to discuss how to improve your confidence in your network reliability by eliminating your false positive errors. Now that's an interesting thing.
So the goal of this process is to improve your work life balance, to let you enjoy your free time, but not having anxiety over things that aren't real in your network.
So Michael, how do you assure that your technology is working as expected?
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah, that's always a good challenge because first thing that's going to happen, you know, you're going to deploy technology and then you're boss is going to come up and say, well, how's it working?
Well, if you look at the alarm log, well, we only generated 10,000 alarms.
So, you know, so what does that mean? You know, is that good or is that bad?
You know, and so, you know, Rationally we think 10,000 alarms seems like pretty excessive. Right, but what if it's only generating two or three alarms? But those alarms are pretty critical. Yeah, you know, but then when you look into them, you find out, oh well, they were completely false, you know, so everybody got upset. You know, you had seven, you know, he had all this big meetings and everything you found, oh well, it's not actually what it says it is, you know, so, you know, how do you balance those things out between the two? And that's, you know, basically where we come in and you know, can really help supply, you know, tools and you know, a better understanding of, you know, each of the technologies. So, you know, so you can basically, you could, you could teach people, you know, basically how to tweak things in order to get it to say something different. So you can help it help figure out exactly where the problem is coming from.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so, so how do you detect anomalies? And, and, and what, and really what are you going to do about them? That's, that's your system. What, how do you detect anomalies?
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Right, right. So while you detect anomalies by having an expectation of what to see next. You know, like I always say, how AI is really good at telling you, you know, what it sees next when it sees some action. But it's also good you telling it that I'm going to do this and this is what I expect to see and then it will, you know, be able to do that a whole lot of times, you know, where it might take you like 10 hours to do it 100 times. It'll do 100 times in half a second, you know, and, you know, it really allows you to, to build, you know, different kinds of tools that aren't really available out there industry today. You know, they're not quite like hacking tools, but they're, they're, you know, things that I've learned like through, you know, doing a lot of work with the router manufacturers and stuff back in the early 90s, you know, you have to build your own traffic generators and basically to simulate computer network.
[00:42:43] Speaker B: That's amazing, man. I mean, the stuff where you had.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: To start and the AI really makes it a lot easier because there's a lot of AI agents out there already, you know, so there's, and there's a lot of stuff that's open that you can build on, you know, but it takes time and it takes some talent and, you know, it doesn't work right the first time. I haven't seen any of them work right the first time yet, but.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Well, again, that's so. So one of the biggest things that we've been talking about, you know, for weeks and months with AI is that you have to start from something that's actually working. The system has to be working.
If it's not already working, you're just going to make that not working way more not working. Right. So that's going to be the biggest problem.
So.
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's why you have to start with the small modules, you know, of doing something specific that, you know, is what is going to happen where you have a controlled environment, you know, and so, You know, by injecting different, you know, different knowns so that you have a, a known output. You are an expected known output, right?
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So when you're looking at these log files, how, how are you be able to tell, you know, you've got to, you've got to have enough background to be able to tell what should be there and what shouldn't be there to be able to tell AI what to look for, don't you?
[00:44:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's where the manufacturers really come in handy because, you know, they see it on a daily basis, you know, and a lot of times, you know, you'll stumble across stuff and they'll say, oh yeah, I've seen that before, okay, I know exactly what the problem is. And they won't tell you, but they'll run off and fix it and come back and give you a new code, you know, because, you know, they're not about to tell you anything but, you know, they won't tell you anything you don't already know. That's one thing about manufacturers, you know, they're not allowed to tell you anything that you, that you didn't tell them.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Well, so, but how do, how do you, our viewer, figure out what is actually causing the issue in order to be able to understand it in your own terms?
[00:44:56] Speaker A: Yes, well, that is the secret, right? I mean, that's what I'm selling, that's the secret sauce, you know, how exactly do you explain it, you know.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so basically what we're saying here, viewers, is that we need you to contact Michael Grimaldi at 250k farms in order to understand how to get this resolution taken care of to track and get all this resolved. Right, Right.
[00:45:29] Speaker A: Yeah, because it's never going to be just one thing, you know, because if it was just one thing, then, you know, somebody would have already canned that one thing and you know, and it would be sold on every street corner.
So. Right.
So experience of course is very important part of it. And like I said, process of elimination, you know, you have to figure out ways of you.
Well, like my old electronics teacher used to teach us, you know, break that circuit in half and then see, does the left half work or does the right half work? Because one of the two doesn't work and troubleshoot it that way.
And that's, you know, I mean, that's really the non secret part of how do you go about determining whether an alarm is correct or not is unique to you see what the alarm is and then go to that source and you know, see, is that what it's really saying?
Like as an example, you could have upper layer protocols discarding packets and it shows on a physical layer that CRC errors are occurring on the link, you know, so the error message that you would get is excessive CRC errors on port xyz, you know, but in reality what's happening is something that's a higher layer, you know, some application that they're running is overflowing the buffers, you know, it's, it's sending more information than can be transferred, you know, for some reason. And then, you know, so that's where you have to focus your, you know, energy at, you know, because one thing about WI Fi, you know, you might plug it into a 10 gig port, but that doesn't mean you're getting 10 gig across the radio, you know, connection to the user, you know. Right, so.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: All right, so, so listen Mike, we're kind of running out of Time here. But one of the things I'd like to make sure that we do is that people can follow your work and continue the conversation with you. Now, how can people reach you?
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Well, the best way to reach us is through our phone number. 689-226-025-468-92260254.
You know, one of the virtual assistants will take information. We can set up an appointment, time and date and. Yeah, we can start talking AI, no less.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: Right?
[00:48:03] Speaker A: Yes.
No, it's a real person. It won't be an AI Person.
Okay. He's still a real person, you know, Real person. You, you know, you have to find out a little bit about each other first, you know? Yeah. All right, well, good age of the machine is coming, I'm sure. But. Yeah, but we use the AI for translating the, you know, and, you know, transcriptions and things like that.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: Perfect.
So, Michael Galdi, again, thanks for sharing your expertise and insights with us today. You know, we've been working together for over 20 years and we even shared, you know, Mr. Toad's wild ride at one point on the freeway when I jumped into the aqueduct in our truck and jumped over the freeway into another truck and almost killed us both. But anyway, that's for another. Another time in another show. Right? So.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Yeah, right, listen, that'll be the Crash and Burn Show.
[00:49:04] Speaker B: We really appreciate what you've shown us on the technology, that it's not just about systems, but about how to integrate them into our lives and business and to our viewers. Remember, technology is always evolving.
But the real key is learning how to adapt, simplify and align systems with what truly matters. That's where the transformation happens. I'm Jim Bradfield, and this has been ever changing technology.
Until next time, keep learning, keep adapting, and keep looking ahead.
