Cloud Reset – The Podcast | Episode 9: Looking Back to Get Your AI Bets Right for 2030 with Michael ‘Chopper’ Reid
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Episode Summary:
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Cloud Reset, hosts Naran McClung and Jonathan Staff sit down with Michael “Chopper” Reid, CEO of Megaport, to discuss the evolving role of network connectivity in the AI-driven world. They cover Megaport’s rapid growth, the shift towards hybrid cloud solutions, and the increasing AWS repatriation trend as businesses seek cost savings and sovereignty over their data.
Michael also shares his vision for the future of leadership, where AI agents could become an integral part of the workforce, shifting the way companies operate. He gives invaluable advice to young professionals on how to future-proof their careers in networking and technology.
Other key topics include:
- The acceleration of AI-driven startups, with companies reaching $100M ARR in record time
- What lessons we should take from the past to make the right bets for tomorrow
- The importance of network connectivity as the ‘oxygen’ of modern infrastructure
- Australia’s geopolitical positioning in AI and the role of sustainable power in the tech race
It’s a fast-paced, thought-provoking conversation packed with insights for CIOs, CFOs, and IT leaders navigating the future of cloud and AI.
Episode Transcript:
Jono, we’re back. Cloud Reset. Here we are again. I’m Naran McClung. I’m the head of our Azure business. Who are you? Jonathan Staff. Right? Jono. So what on earth have we been up to the last couple of days?
I think we’ve had a pretty, uh, interesting last couple of days down in Berry and it’s always great to take some time out of your business to work on your business and what better location to do it than Berry And uh, I’ll tell you what though, I’m not sure you spent as much time working on the business as you did riding push bike.
I don’t care for your tone. Uh, I think whatever I do in my spare time when everybody’s asleep and it’s dark and I’m riding in the cobwebs and all the rest of it, that’s totally up to me. I will say this though, when I got to the top of Berry Mountain and the sun was coming up, what just a magnificent place Barry is, and I think everybody who lives there, by the way, looks happy to me.
Uh, it’s, it’s a relaxed place. Um, everybody’s pretty, pretty happy about being there, I think. And we were too. And, uh, yeah, wonderful accommodation and two days working on our business. And, you know, the thing that I really enjoyed about that most was a lot of the conversation around our product roadmap. I.
Where we’re headed in the future, led by our CTO Shaun Domingo.
Shaun did an amazing job of bringing that together. I know that he’s a very deliberative chap. He’s very clever. He takes a lot of inputs. He takes input from you and I, Jono. We’re on the front end of this business. We obviously get feedback and insights from our customers and prospects on what the market wants.
He’s really bringing that to life. There’s some amazing things around the corner. What did I like? I like breach attack simulation in the security space, but I’m super excited about all the hybrid developments. That are occurring as well as the development of private lms. I know that with the law firms that I’m working with at the moment, they care a lot about that.
They care a lot about data sovereignty, for obvious reasons as a law firm, and we’re doing some wonderful work in that space with Dell and with Red Hat OpenShift.
Really, really good. And on the hybrid side of things, thinking about customers who are looking at alternative options when it comes to hypervisors and clouds, right?
And I know, uh, something you are passionate about is, you know, AWS repatriation seems to be becoming. More of a thing.
I love that you say that with a smirk, right? I have the license to talk about it. I’m the head of our Azure business. I would talk about it. We’ve mentioned it once before. It’s a real thing.
We have a number of projects on the go where customers and prospects alike are asking us to save them money and they wanna move workloads out of AWS to embrace in part. Azure local, and it seems like the market is becoming increasingly aware of Azure Local.
Absolutely. And none of this would be possible without network connectivity.
Indeed, which leads us nicely to our guests. Now, I’m not quite ready to introduce our guests as Yes. But I will say this, um, network connectivity. Connectivity, sorry. Enables all of this.
It certainly does. It certainly does. Very excited to get into that. Indeed. Let’s go. Let’s go.
Right. It’s now with great enthusiasm that I introduce our guest. This dashing Young go-getter holds a degree in aerospace engineering. Can you believe that? He was once, uh, on the cover of CEO Magazine as the sales executive of the year. He joined from Cisco, where he led a pure play SaaS network vis visibility business.
Thousand eyes. Staff went from one 50 to 400 and annual recurring revenue grew 2.4 times. He has since joined a well-known business known as Megaport Megaport, where he has completely transformed Megaport’s suite of products and innovations. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce Michael Chopper.
Reed. Welcome Michael.
Thanks for having me, gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a cool studio too.
It’s pretty cool. Yes. We like it here. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve had a few chats here now. Um, yeah, we’re kind of easing on into it.
Mm. No more breaking microphones.
No. Well, listen, we’re not gonna talk about that.
Obviously, I’m in the bad books for doing that. But look, first and foremost, congratulations on your results.
Thank you.
What we wanna ask you, what’s fueling this? Where’s this coming from?
Uh, it’s, we, we announced. Was it last week? We actually did our full, our half year earnings call. Uh, I’d say it was, it’s been a big turnaround inside the business.
Uh, Megaport’s product’s been this incredible product set and we’ve been around for about 11 years disrupting this sort of global telco space. Uh, the last year and a half or a bit longer that I’ve been in the role, we’ve been transforming the go to market, bringing the products back to innovation and scaling that in a major way.
So we’ve been turning on a whole range of different data centers globally and, and just basically doing more of everything. So. The great news is after about a year and a half of building and, and, and sort of rolling out more of everything, more humans, more tech, more products, more locations, more speed, more bandwidth, more, more, more, more, uh, it’s been seen inside the results of like the KPIs and the numbers that we report to the street.
And so. It was a great reception, uh, which is always nice. The, the share price responded nicely with that. Um, yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s basically the, the culmination of more that we’re doing, showcasing itself inside the financials.
Look. We love it. I mean, we’re obviously a big customer of yours, um, and we love you guys, by the way.
Yes. Well listen, there’s mutual love there and uh, yeah, a lot of love. A lot of love in the Room of love. Lot of love in the room. Uh, it was a big part of the Collabor bro story, wasn’t it, Jono? That was a repatriation story. We’re proud of that. A partnership with Dell Megaport had a role to play there.
Yeah, absolutely. I think the, the partnership with Megaport’s really important. Naran and I were doing a bit of an intro for the podcast today and uh, and I know you and I spoke a couple of weeks ago and just talking about connectivity, often being. Uh, not heard or seen and kind of the unsung hero of a lot of the complicated solutions Yes.
That we’re taking to market and that customers rely on every single day. And I know you’ve been on this incredible growth journey, which is, you know, expanding into other markets and innovating with your products. And that’s been, um, you know, really, really interesting to see the, the takeup of that. Has anything really surprised you along the way?
Did, does it, did anything unexpected happen or is this all really planned and, and deliberate?
You mean inside what we’ve built from the business side
or Yeah, just your, your, your growth journey.
Yeah. I’d say the, you said something at the start that we sort of, uh, the un the unsung hero being network, so I think there was a time when network was really cool.
Um, you know, back in the sort of 2000s, isn’t it like, you know, as the internet sort of came to be, network was the coolest place to be and I think, uh, over time, most recently. Certainly AI has become the coolest place to be. GPUs, chips, clouds, data centers are really, really cool. And there’s a huge amount of discussion around that.
There’s so much capital going into it, it’s just exploding everywhere. I mean, you guys have got a whole range of data. So you’re in the cool club right now. Uh, and, and here we are as this, uh, connectivity provider globally. But it, what’s interesting is you, you said it before, it’s like the unsung hero networks, like a bit like oxygen.
Uh, you just, you sort of take it for granted. But if you remove oxygen from this room, we’d know really quickly that we desperately need oxygen. Uh, and the other example I constantly refer to as, so if you’re, if you’ve ever been on international flight or any, uh, long-term flight and you, you pay for the wifi connection on the flight and then you experience it going in and out and in and out.
Yeah. And turning off and do, trying to restart it and reconnect it, and the frustration and the inability to actually do anything anymore. Because all of your documents are in the cloud and everything is actually online. And so the network is still, without a doubt, the most important connecting connective tissue between all of this and without it is like oxygen.
Nothing operates. And so I think it’s, um, it’s good to see that that, that what we’re seeing from a network perspective is it’s sort of becoming, I guess, a bit cooler again, to be in that space. There’s a lot of folks that are sort of jumping into the industry and wanting to study a CCNA or whatever it may be.
So as we’ve, as we’ve scaled out, uh, and, and probably more in line with, with, uh, some of the discussion we’ll have around sort of GPU space and ai, we’ve seen this explosion in investment for AI of some description, and that played out in the form of, a whole range of sort of backwards caps, kids getting VC capital and going, I’ve just raised a hundred million dollars in doing an AI company.
And what they ended up doing was buying a bunch of Nvidia chips and then they stick them somewhere, um, anywhere and then, and then they sort of build this thing and they say, I’m building GPU as a service. Mm. And then they’d sort of finish this build and they were desperately trying to find any space, anyone’s data center.
And then they’re like, well, now we need to get customers to it.
Mm-hmm.
And all of a sudden the most important thing for them became the network. So we’ve become cool as sort of a, yeah, a default of what they’re trying to build. And so we launched this AI exchange, which I, we, we announced, um, at, at the half.
Uh, and all of these GPU as a Service companies are just rushing to connect onto that so that all their cus or all the future customers they’re trying to get to can go and access them. So it’s sort of a, it’s, it’s too that, that would be surprising. That sort of flow didn’t, did, didn’t see that. Way, mean way, or I think we, we see that as like, that is has to happen, but of course, but it takes a while for them to realise that this has to happen.
They to figure out it out sort of accelerated really quickly.
It’s a, yeah, like, I mean, speaking of that, you know, obviously the theme of, of this series that we’re doing the CEO series is, uh, we’re trying to all be time travelers. Where fast forward five years thinking about our business and what AI means for our business and how AI’s transformed our business.
And, uh, and if we’ve done it well, we’ve probably become smarter, faster, better than we’ve ever been before. But the really interesting thing for us and our listeners is, and business leaders in Australia, is how, how might we have got there? Mm. And what are the steps and what are the practical things we should be doing today?
To set us on the right path. And I know, um, you know, obviously as it relates to Megaport, you’re, you are thinking about these things and, uh, you’re, you’re in, you, you’re really quite embedded and, uh, to your point, like oxygen in, in this, in this space. Um, have you got any, you know, advice for. Business leaders trying to figure out how to get on, how to get on the right path, how to take the right steps, how’s that showing up in your business?
Yeah, uh, it’s a good question. The cool thing, and probably the reason why we’re all in tech is that it’s always changing. It’s, it’s always hard to predict actually. Uh, and it’s, it’s always hypey and so there’s always something that’s really hype. But if you think of any moment in your tech career, there’s always something that was super hypey at that point in time when cloud first came to be, maybe when crypto came into the market.
Um, data centers got less cool now they’re cool again, like all these different, um, sort of trends for me to look in the future. I think the easiest way is just to look backwards and sort of see what was happening in the past. And if you compare the, if you compare, there’s multiple areas of AI here playing out.
But if you look at sort of this, this training, this insatiable demand for, for access to GPU and Nvidia just reported. Mm-hmm. I think it was yesterday. Um, crazy growth yet again, like 85% growth or something. Didn’t
take long for that share price to bounce back. Did it?
Oh, it’s, it’s wild. I mean, yeah, the whole DeepSeek, everyone freaked out.
Like, I mean, all it’s, this is the thing. It’s very hypey, little tiny, um, things that come out, change everyone’s opinion and, and I think they’re, they’re wrong on both sides. They’re wrong on the downside. They’re probably wrong on the upside, but I think where, where they are, um, it’s just, it’s just such a, um.
It’s such a wild market at the moment. But one thing’s for sure is you’ve got these cats that are, that are, that are demanding huge amounts of GPUs and it’s really centered around a few of the bigger players as you, as you know. So you’ve got, I mean even Musk just came out with xAI just the other day.
Those, I think he’s got 200,000 GPUs connected together in a data center that he, crazy. I think a data center that was a warehouse that he then went and basically. Bought all the diesel generators across the entire United States and put them on one side and, and stuck all the cooling he could find, uh, around the United States.
Stuck that on the other side. And then put all his battery packs in between because of the, the, the, the speed at which the, the power needs to be deployed. Like, it’s just so insane how quickly this space is moving. But at the, at the training end, it’s sort of concentrated around the players that can afford it, you know, the Google’s, the Amazons, Microsofts, and, and so forth.
How the rest of us will sort of, um, leverage the AI platforms is not everyone’s gonna build these models. They’re gonna leverage these models and, and it’s like, what can you do with them? So if you look backwards and say, how did this play out with cloud? It’s kind of similar. In that there’s a few players that have been building out massive amounts of infrastructure globally.
They’ve had to land in all these different data centers. It’s huge capital expenditure. Uh, it takes time then for folks to sort of come on that journey. This is far more accelerated than the cloud piece. Uh, but then you sort of follow it. And so Megaport went through this with cloud. So cloud wasn’t, you know, no one was moving to cloud 11 years ago, and then all of a sudden it became Yes.
And now it’s the thing. And it’s kind of got to a point where there’s actually a mix of repatriation of coming in and out of cloud.
Yeah.
And so the, the, the goal for us is to make sure that we follow very quickly to ensure the connectivity aligns to whatever it is, is, is, is happening from a trend. So in, in the GPU space where at where we will always land with the GPU as a service providers, we are already, uh, on ramp all of the cloud providers into that GPU space.
So that will be there, but the, the next piece probably becomes sort of inference. Which is where you leverage in a model, and you probably want that closer to the edge, and there’s still a lot of compute requirement associated with that. Yep. Um, so you, I think you just gotta follow as quickly as possible, uh, with wherever it’s heading.
Make sure that you are solving the problem. In our case, we solve the network piece for, for customers that are listening, they’re gonna have to solve whatever it means for their business. Mm. But you have to embrace it. Like all tech, doesn’t matter. Any historical tech that’s come forward. It’s very disruptive for your business if you are not embracing it as fast as your competitors.
Yeah. And that always becomes the play. It’s what hundred percent your competitors are doing.
Um, two consistent messages that came from our conversation with Steven Worrall more recently. Peter James, our chairman. Yes. Um, talking about lived experience. Uh, and that, um, obviously there’s so much out there in the press and on YouTube with the AI influencers, but it’s better to form your own opinion.
And we know this ourselves within our own business. Um, the projects that we’ve run, we have a completely different perception of how to bring generative AI to life by virtue of the projects that we’ve run. And they were living, breathing. Life cycles within a space of weeks. You know, one week we’re working on one model.
The next week we’re working on another model. It’s changing. So connectivity, hugely important to that as well. The efficiency of being able to get in and out of an LLM efficiently. Yes. To be token efficient, keep the costs down as well. We get asked that a lot too, and I know. Some of the Microsoft technologies, um, are expensive, but in fairness to Microsoft, um, there’s a lot of tokens in play and there’s a lot of costs there as well.
And so I think many businesses are trying to figure out not just how to embrace this technology and how to embrace it safely as well. And the law firms, Jono, that we are working with that want sovereign capabilities again and Right. And this brings to bear this conversation of hybrid and you wanna talk about trends, I mean, you know.
We would say this of course, but hybrid for us has exploded in the last four, 12 months. Yeah,
yeah.
Uh, and it’s about right workload in the right place. But for the generative AI story, this lived experience is the number one thing. And I think only through application and having the luxury of clever inspired people, what we describe them as, crazy, mad scientists.
Jono, what was the terminology? Yeah, I think it was the mad scientist, demand scientist. The luxury of having those people in your business and, and the cycles for them to play and develop this capability, um, is a wonderful thing. And I think many organisations are going through this right now.
Yeah, I think that’s right.
And Michael, I know when you, when you talk about, you know, the strategy for Megaport and you, I think you’re keeping a really keen eye on, on what everybody else is up to and, and where the connectivity needs to be. All right, so you can be there maybe a little bit ahead of, you know, if, okay, we’re we, people need to land on GPUs as a service, we’re gonna be there.
Yeah. People need to move workloads between clouds. Megaport’s gonna be there and make it really easy. That’s, um, I think that’s kind of draws some parallels to the last conversation we had with Peter James. He, he talked about the Wayne Gretzky analogy of understanding where the puck is going. Yeah. That ice hockey analogy.
And I feel like you are sort of saying a very similar thing. So like from leading your business right, where there’s, there’s a lot of growth opportunity being fueled by AI adoption. And the ecosystem around that. Mm. You are trying to think about where the, where the puck is going. How do we be there in advance
to some extent.
Uh, and this is, I think, the play more so with AI than anything else in terms of the speed at which it’s moving. And you just mentioned it before. Mm-hmm. You’re, you are finding incredibly smart people to come into the business that are keeping up with the crazy changes and trends to add the value back to your customers.
Because no one can keep up with this. So you need these smart humans that are just holding it together. ’cause tomorrow something else comes outta it, a hundred percent.
New models were coming out, like within the development life cycle, within sprints. All of a sudden they’re working on something crazy didn’t exist the day before.
It’s
so fast. Yeah. Yeah. We’re one of the tools we’ve built, leveraging like 16 different models. It’s
nuts.
It’s, it’s
crazy. So, so with that. None of us, even, even the, you know, the, the skate to the puck piece where it’s going, none of us really know where it’s going, and that’s what we sort of, but what you have to be able to do is constantly bet on choice.
And offering as much choice. So you’re sort of betting on the puck being in multiple areas. Mm-hmm. And so long as you’re directionally correct and you are placing bets, then what you’re offering your customers is choice. Because in in that example, you said 12 models or whatever, it’s Yeah. Imagine that we had made a bet to say that the one particular model from OpenAI was the option.
Yeah.
And we put all our eggs in that basket and, and maybe right now it was. But then smart person comes in and goes, oh, I’ve just found this really interesting thing, which is DeepSeek, or it’s, you know, it’s, uh, I don’t know, the xAI, it’s constantly happening at the moment. Yeah. So then you go, I’ve made my bets over here, but now it’s over there a hundred percent.
So the answer is. You gotta, you gotta actually do all and offer as much choice for the customer as possible. That’s the speaking of
choice. Um, we often talk about cost and risk. I’m gonna be a little bit controversial here, Michael. I’m the head of the Azure business, which means that I’m allowed to talk negatively, negatively about other public cloud platforms, one of which being AWS I wanna get a feel from you how much a AWS repatriations going on, because clearly, um.
That was in some of the stories of some of the work that we’ve done with you in lighting up, uh, the network path for that and obviously reducing egress cost burden. How much AWS repatriation are you seeing in market?
Yeah, it goes back to that choice discussion. Mm-hmm. And I think, uh. The cloud providing the cloud providers have become more mature over time.
AI is not mature right now. It is just all over the place. You would, it’s hard to know where it’s gonna land. If you look back in time, there was a moment where everyone thought there was only gonna be one cloud to rule them all. Mm. And that was AWS at the very start. I mean, they, they certainly pioneered that space.
Megaport was fast. To, to land in that environment. Uh, but obviously Azure came up and we were obviously fast to follow that space. Course. Remember the choice offering. We not to place a bet. Of course, we’re offering choice and the customer can make that decision. Uh, but as it’s sort of gone on, there’s, there’s all these different costs that come through taxes in different spaces.
I mean, we just launched a, a Nat Gateway product, which is, you know, literally saving 70% of nat costs. There’s egress and how you, and I know you, you, you guys are really clever around how you’ve. Um, plan to extract data from these clouds and if you do it by a certain path and leveraging megaport in many cases to do that.
Yep. But you’ve also even figured out the certain places to extract, which I didn’t even realize was a thing. You can reduce down significant cost savings to your customers. Yeah. Which becomes super important. But kind of what we’ve seen back to the choice piece, and this is why choice is a really good thing.
There’s different workloads and, and different things that make sense in different locations. Um, clouds are never going away and their growth is gonna continue to be insane. But there are certain things that a, a customer that I, I know you would be guiding them on to say there’s a huge cost saving that you could have by moving this into a particular different, uh, way of delivering That’s right.
Either on premise, maybe it’s like a wasabi function. Maybe it’s like a. You guys have got a storage as a service that makes more sense because of the amount of, um, transactions that are occurring. Or it’s a chatty app and therefore, so it’s horses for courses, but it’s choice. And so we, we are seeing just so much movement Mm.
Between not just the traditional cloud providers, but on premise and all of these niche ones that are appearing. Yes. And GPU is just the extension of that. That’s right. That’s the next version of an interesting cloud player. That’s a
perfect way to articulate it. And I think that’s, that’s what we’re seeing.
Um. This is the emergence of hybrid and true hybrid as well, which was always the promise of bringing disparate environments together with a consistent operational experience and freedom of movement, largely powered by Megaport. I think only in recent times has that promise really lived up to expectation.
Uh, and I think customers today want that choice and this idea of just simple lift and shifts into the public cloud and it’ll be fine. Our buyers are more discerning. Uh, they want better bang for buck. Risk is a play as well. Data sovereignty’s important, particularly as it relates to LLMs. It’s not just the law firms that we work with as well.
It’s banks, it’s uh, superannuation funds. It’s any number of customer vertical, um, that is really thinking. Quite clearly. Um, and also discerning on where these things should run. Does it represent good value for money? And, and now getting the performance that I expect from it,
yeah, knowing where your data is is I think, just gonna become more important than ever before.
Mm-hmm. Uh, and it doesn’t mean your data can’t live, you know, in, in other nations or, or wherever you need it to be, but knowing where it is and being very deliberate. About how you connect to it and, and how much money you spend to make sure that you’ve got, you know, good data, durability and it’s safe and protected from cyber attacks and all that stuff.
Now, with ai, I think is gonna be, you know, something we, things we’ve always known are important, um, increasingly important more so than ever before. We spoke a little bit about, uh, on a couple of our, like probably the Steven Worrall and, and Peter James talking about more a political lens of, you know, how is Australia.
Moving as a market in its adoption of ai, what does that mean for us economically geopolitically? Mm. Um, and there was, there was an interesting thread coming out around nation states using AI to leapfrog their economic development and geopolitical. Uh, standing. I wonder how that translates into business in a competitive sense.
Mm. Right. And are we going to start seeing, uh, organisations who sort of haven’t really been on the radar, suddenly appear like as a force in the market? It’s, it’s. Uh,
AI is again, disrupting it so much. One interesting thing to look at is I used to talk about, uh, zero to a hundred million dollars in ARR.
So basically from a startup in the valley, moving from zero revenue, I inception to then how quickly can you get to a hundred million? How quickly, 200, 500, a billion, et cetera, et cetera, and so on. Uh, and. That used to be sort of the fastest one that they’d ever seen that broke the record was a company called Wiz.
Hmm.
Uh, which is a, a cybersecurity company. You guys probably work with them. And they went from zero to a hundred million in ARR and just in record time, they beat Facebook, Google, my, you name it, like, it was just the, the record. Um, and they were, they, their first line of code was written in April, 2020, first line of code.
They didn’t have a product, and then I think by 2021 or 2022, they’d hit a hundred million in ARR. They’d hit some ridiculous percent. You have to look it up, but the, the percentage of Fortune 500 for, you know, fortune 100, et cetera, that was actually using it was insane. It was the fastest startup in the history of time.
Google went to buy them for like 23 billion, they turned them down and they’re still growing at a rate of knots. Um, my point around that statement is that was just the most unbelievable growth story ever. If you look at it now, there’s a whole range of companies that have been invented in the last year that have hit a hundred million in ARR.
Yeah. Like, because of this AI space, this sound like a, a normal thing. It’s becoming normal because the, they’re using, they’re using AI to write the code, so the code’s been written so much faster. They’re solving problems so much quicker. Mm. And they’re exploding. And I just saw a list of them the other day.
I was like, oh my God, this is, there’s lots and lots of them and there’s probably like 30 people in the company.
Yeah.
So the point is, it’s just wild. That is wild. That’s more of a Silicon Valley disruption. The Australian story is what? There’s no reason we can’t deliver that here. You no, you, you, you no longer need the access to the talent that you probably had in the valley.
You, if you are smart and good with some of these AI platforms, no matter where you are, you can build that. So. We should, we should take our fair share of that space. But our fair share, just to remind you, is like, we are small than California in terms of population. So we’re a small country with a ma, we’re a small number of humans across a large, large continent.
Uh, so yeah, you, you gotta temper your expectations with percentage of humans that we have that could be, uh, delivering that. But the last one I’ll add the sovereign piece becomes critical geopolitical is, is. It’s, it’s challenging, like it’s unstable, I’d say globally. And people are, countries are changing bets at the moment, as you can see.
So where your data is becomes really important. Uh, but the last one is, this seems to be a race of power. Like that’s what this AI thing seems to be highlighting to the world is wherever you wanna land in the future, having access to huge amounts of power that’s. Well priced and sustainable in some way, i.e. Help.
Not, not just destroying the environment is, is super important and Australia’s lagging and significantly behind that. Yeah. So if we want to play in this space and, and remember we were, we dunno the exact bet to take, but you could, you can say that you need to follow the choice, uh, and you need to go as uh, uh, you know, make, I think reasonable bets down that path.
Power is for sure something we would, we should be ha we should be playing in at some point, which is, I know it’s a political topic in Australia at the moment, but I think it’s, no, it is, it is. You have to remove the politics and just get it done. It tried
to pin Steven Worrall down for a, for a, uh, his opinion on that.
He wouldn’t give us one. But he certainly had, he certainly had views, right. We talked about nuclear. I mean, that was the obvious conversation. I think he had a
view. I mean that’s part, and rightly so to your point, part of the national discourse, you know, there’s an election coming up and, um. I think, I think there’s a broadly held view that say nuclear power will form part of our energy mix in Australia at some point in time.
It’s just a, a matter, a matter of when. Um, and obviously you made a good point about, um, power being so important, but obviously not destroying the environment, um, at the same time. So these are, these are pretty topical thing. Yeah, it’s a,
it’s a balance. I think there’s answers. I think that, um, you know, they become very political and, um, almost religious debates that, that are beyond sort of.
Just logic. So it’s, it’s not something, it’s not my cause to champion, but just sort of observing. Because what will happen is the, the workloads will move to those locations and maybe we just say, that’s fine. We don’t need those workloads here, and we’re happy to train or do whatever we want to do elsewhere.
And then guess what becomes really, really important. Massive networks. Massive global networks. And here’s Megaport. So we’re, that’s right. We’re, we are here to support anyone’s, uh, requirement to get anywhere on the planet. Um, but the sovereign thing becomes a thing, so yeah.
Alright. Yeah. Really interesting.
You know, that idea of, I I just, that that stat you gave around the number of zero to a hundred million startups. Oh, that’s crazy. Um, and clearly fueled by ai, something that was once incredibly rare. How could you do it? Yeah. Very common. And I think the takeaway for some of our listeners is. You know, there’s a long held view.
There’s certain, there’s certain brands or companies that you might invest in solutions from where there’s that old adage of nobody gets fired for buying XX, yes. Right. Maybe, maybe keep your eye out for some of this other stuff that’s coming, because it could be, it could be where you need to be placing a bet.
Right? It’s,
yeah, it’s, it’s so fast, and I think the only, the only problem with things that move so fast is that something else can follow them and move even faster and, and a really good example is. You know, open AI versus what Grok just came out with.
Mm.
I mean, Grok was a few years, years and years behind that.
And they’ve, in theory, in theory, if you look at the numbers, they’ve surpassed that with just one cycle. And so you, you know, like if you, all your bet was there, then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, it’s moving to this. So they, as fast as these things are coming, they can also be fast. Fast themselves can be disrupted quickly.
Yes. Which, which is why it’s so hard to, to figure it out.
Well, this is a great segue because whilst we think about our products and roadmaps, and Jono and I have just come back from two days in, in Berry where we were talking about all of this stuff, direction, what we’re investing in next, um, our employees are thinking about their careers, they’re thinking about development, and uh, in fact, we have a subscriber question Ooh, of a young gentleman coming in.
By the name of Debesh. Uh, he has a question. He’s a recent graduate from our hosting management center. Um, we train our graduates in all different skill sets, obviously networking, Microsoft Security, Azure, private Cloud, Dell Technologies, a whole raft of products there that we work with. And so, Debesh has a question for you.
We’re gonna cut to Debesh. is gonna ask you directly.
Awesome.
Hi Michael. Uh, my name’s Debesh. I’m a graduate engineer at MCS. Um, I just wanted to gain some understanding from you on what you think a network engineer’s role will look like in five years time, and if you had any advice for me as I’m starting out my career.
Great question. Debesh. Uh, I think the good news is we’ve talked about a lot of disruption and change and, and this sort of trying to predict where the puck is gonna be. And it’s very hard to land that at the moment with the AI space. But one thing I can tell you about networking is it’s been around a long time.
And the way in which networking work works actually hasn’t changed. And so if you look at, uh, great examples of of learning is something like a Cisco, a CCNA, I think it’s Cisco, what is it called? Network Associate programs. I did that many years ago when I was, um, first stepping into the IT space. My background was aerospace engineering, so I was more of an engineering background and my pivot into tech was literally because I couldn’t get a job in aerospace, ’cause I didn’t have any in Australia and.
I thought I’ll go work at NASA in the United States, but it turns out you needed to have a secret clearance. So sort of, yeah, that’s how you get into IT in the past, the good news is you can do degrees and you can do study and, and land in, in tech, um, in a different way now. But if you go to networking, as I said before, networking’s like oxygen.
It’s also, uh, not gonna change a great deal in that it will innovate and will add faster and, and more interesting things. But the actual core premise on how IP actually works hasn’t changed. So IP addresses is still, still the way in which it all works. Um, so I’d spend the time to learn. The other thing I would say that, that I wouldn’t have said a few years ago that has changed.
Is build a community and the community is probably online. We have someone called Alexis who does a lot of, um, publishing for us, and she’s amazing. But she, you know, what she’s done really well is formed online connections globally through LinkedIn is probably the easiest example. Maybe it’s TikTok or whatever.
And form a community of folks that you follow and learn from podcasts and, and all these different pieces are, are key. Uh, and the, the, the two things I would always say, no matter what role is just curiosity and passion. If you, if you’re curious and you put the energy into learn, there’s so much resource out there that you can absorb.
The most interesting and fascinating, humans will spend the time having a conversation on a podcast that you can learn from, that you just couldn’t when I was growing up. And, and so just absorb as much as you can. Read as many books as you can on the pro, on the, on the subject. And the last one is passion.
If you are passionate about whatever it is that you do, all these other opportunities will open up for you. People will find you, people will change your roles and giving you new, uh, new things to do in your life. And. Um, that’s how I ended up in a sales path, and that’s where I took from sales tech, high, high end, high tech sales, and then ended up in sort of leadership and then ended up in acquiring companies and then ended up sort of as a CRO and then a CEO.
I’d say it’s curiosity and sort of passion and sort of, it’ll flow your career correctly. It’ll just take you on the right path.
Incredible advice. Uh, Michael from somebody who’s, who’s been on the path, like cur, curiosity’s, everything. Yeah.
And tech’s a cool place to be if you’re curious. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Um, great answer. And um, I know Debesh should be thrilled with that. Um, we’re on to, uh, switching gears. We’ve got, uh, something that we, we put to every guest. Yeah. And that’s our quickfire question.
Yeah. So, um, I’m gonna hit you up with the first one, so don’t panic. You ready? It’s okay. Um, so thinking of our listeners, you know, business leaders out there, other CEOs, CIOs, CFOs trying to make good decisions in this market, a big thing that everybody’s struggling with is attracting and retaining the smartest people.
And you were talking about how important it is to have those smart humans in your business staying on trend and helping you place the right bets. Yes. Um. How do, how do you approach that at Megaport? Have you got any advice on that?
I think it’s the same for every company. Culture is like the cardinal rule.
If you’ve got a great culture at your company, people are gonna be attracted to that. If you’re a growth organisation, like think about yourself, where do you want work? Do you wanna work? We’re somewhere that is doing more, or do you want to work for someone that’s doing less and trying to do less? The answer is.
Ideally wanna follow a company that’s growing, that’s investing, that’s doing different things. So you’d find that you then wanna make sure that the culture of that company is good. So if you fall into both of those pieces, the culture is key. You can’t fake culture and it comes out socially like IE Now if you look at it, you should be able to follow the company or people in the company socially, on LinkedIn, on something, and you’ll feel.
Their company’s culture flow through that. And that is probably the easiest way to attract talent.
Okay. So look, the whole theme of this series is that we, we went forward five years. The promise of generative AI lived up to everything that we expected it to. And what decisions did we make? And I guess to that end, um, what do you think a managed service provider, perhaps like us, perhaps like other MSPs, what are we gonna look like five years from today?
I’d say pretty similar. Okay. Uh, in that, to me, a managed service provider solves a customer’s problem at the end of the day. And that problem is never going away. It’s getting harder and more complex. Mm. Uh, that problem is becoming more and more focused around the innovation of the company itself. So what I mean by that is you are in, in MSP world, in your world, it’s usually tech that you’re solving for, you know, I mean, unless you’re.
Managing chairs and furniture. I don’t think that’s his space. This is all I know when I do Yeah, that’s right. You’re trying to sell lights. Yeah. Well, uh, but in effect, the, the tech is the thing that ensures the customer re remains competitive and innovative, but it’s getting harder and harder, uh, to try and work out where your bets are.
And then once you, uh, put that in, security becomes this incredibly challenging. Uh, problem that needs to be solved. So the point of that is you are always gonna need experts to do that. So the MSP won’t, I think, I don’t know. Um. You know, specifically there, there might be changes with MSPs. Well, but I think it becomes more focused and more niche in the areas that you’re very good at.
Yes. And, and that is important, and we talked about the knowledge around those cloud environments and sort of not that deep knowledge around that you can save your customer a fortune if you are a, if you’re just across everything and you’re delivering a cloud service to your customers Yeah. But you don’t know that depth.
Yes. You don’t realize what you’re doing wrong for the customer. So it’s, it’s, it’s important to have the. The expertise and the depth, which is the humans that you have and the experience with your customers. So I don’t, I see it. Um. Uh, I see. What you’ll, you’ll be doing is just remains so critical to customers and more and more customers will need that.
Yeah. They need those services.
We used to get criticized for it and it was, um, it was certainly a light bulb moment for me when I joined Macquarie Cloud Services. It’s just how passionate we are, not just about the things that we do, but it’s the things we don’t do. Um, and we go deep and long with our partners with.
Dealt with Microsoft. I mean, Azure is the only public cloud platform we work with, and I’ve never felt more comfortable with those decisions because the complexity is increasing. The types of questions we’re getting asked from our customers and prospects, they’re challenging. You know, all the questions around data platform embracing generative ai, you know, what does it mean to.
Uh, to develop and to embrace hybrid, what does hybrid mean for me? Um, security’s baked into every single product. So the evolution and life cycle of our products now is all happening in parallel. Mm-hmm. It’s all working together. Shaun brought this to life for us, Jono in, in Berry for our QBR recently, and you can just see all these decisions coming together.
Um, so yeah, look, I mean, I think, um, I think you’re in a safe spot. I hope so. I hope so.
Yeah, like great insights come outta these questions. Um, here’s a, here’s a curly one for you. Uh, and maybe some of, uh, some Megaport employees are listening in five years time. What does your leadership team look like?
My specific leadership team would look very similar.
I think I, um, the humans, uh, despite what AI may be sort of convincing everyone, uh, I still passionately believe that humans are pretty important in this mix. And if you look at. Uh, the most important thing for a tech business is to build world class tech products that solve customer problems. That is the number one mission.
And the second mission is you’ve gotta take that to market. And the two of those things have to align. It’s actually humans that create tech. So if you actually say that, that is the key, you actually pivot the company to actually, the humans are the most important element of any company, which is why I go back to originally.
Culture is the most important thing. And so it all sort of stacks backwards from that. Uh, I think my leadership team will look similar. I don’t see new functions arising ’cause the functions can land inside that personally. So they could play this and, and prove me completely wrong. But one thing I will say about leadership is an interesting sort of, uh, take is I think we will have a different leadership function in the business.
And that is instead of leaders of people. Leaders of AI things. So it could be like a, a, an AI stack or an ai, um, process or an AI function or, and you might have a whole range of these, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s, um, what is the agents? Agents, that’s what I’m looking for. The agentic world that we find ourselves in.
That’s, it’s very agentic.
Look at me go. I got it. Right. You got it right. That’s what I was trying
to, like, what is it? It’s so new. It’s, but I, I have a feeling you’ll have a. Imagine and, and imagine if you want to say, you know, tell your, your, your children what to invest in. If you could lead and manage, not humans, but manage a whole range of these AI agents, your scale would be off the charts.
It’s endless. And so if I, I feel like there will be a leadership style role. But in a technical form of managing these agents to just scale at an insane pace.
That’s, that’s really interesting to think about. Yeah. I’ve never thought about it like that. Yeah. You, you get that. That’s a, yeah. That’s something for a lot of people listening to think about.
And
the cool part about that is if you are smart, you find those smart people and you get good at that. Imagine the value that you can turn up to a company with almost like an army of employee. Like you think if some people try to hire a leader to bring their people across with them. Yeah. Imagine this, you’re hiring a leader to bring their army of AI agents that they can orchestrate beautifully, and then it just becomes this off the charts insane scale now.
If they’re that good, they probably build their own company and they’ve already done that, and that’s why they’re at a hundred million in arr. But the point is, the point is Jono, you know what comes to
mind? It’s the, it’s a, it’s a more sophisticated tech flavor of Willie from The Simpsons with his one man band, and he’s doing it all at once.
That’s what it is. This, this is what I got in my head. I love that you, yeah,
perfect. That sense of humor is going, I, I make those jokes and people look at me now and they don’t. Oh, but I get it. Yeah.
But see, that was the golden era of the Simpsons. It really was. And you just have to be a student of that. I tell my mom and dad that the Simpsons raised
me.
I think that’s true.
Mixture of Seinfeld. I throw Seinfeld jokes out and people look at me. I threw an Anchorman joke out the other day. Oh. Got said. I’m kind of a big deal. And someone looked at me and I said, no, it’s a joke. Anyway,
that’s, you know, there’s, there’s some good stuff for our listeners to think about and if you dunno what an AI agent is, uh, go and ask Chat.
GPT. Yeah. Figure it out. Right. Study up. That’s it. Really.
Cool.
Look. I think that’s a wrap, Michael. Um, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You guys. Um, always great talking to you again. Congratulations on your success. We love it. Uh, we love seeing everything that you put on LinkedIn as well. It’s inspirational for us.
Um, Alexis, we see a lot of her stuff too as well. We’d love to get her on the podcast one day. She her. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. She’s cool. Wonderful to have you here. Congratulations, and thanks for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks very much. That’s cloud reset. What a great chat with Michael Reid, CEO of Megaport.
We talked about a whole bunch of stuff. I don’t even know where to start now. We talked about cloud repatriation. We talked about the emergence of hybrid. I think Megaport are there for everyone and every move, hence the fantastic results that they’re enjoying on the stock market. I don’t know, like what stood out for you in the conversation?
We didn’t get to the origins of his nickname, but I know we had a bit of fun with that. We did. I’ll tell, I’ll tell you what did stand out to me was his view on the leadership team of the future.
Yes.
Now imagine, I, and I had never considered this, but imagine a world where future leaders are bringing teams of their own AI agents with them and their experts with AI agents for different business processes or specialisations.
I thought that was. A really interesting insight. We hadn’t heard that one before.
I think we need some new terminology. I think it’s actually a farm of AI agents. And you’re a an AI farmer. Essentially.
An AI farmer. I like it. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I like it. Why not?
Why not? Yeah, indeed. But look, he was a great guy and um, I know he’s a busy guy as well, so how lucky we to have Michael.
Yeah, super lucky. And I know our listeners will appreciate a lot of his insights and I can’t wait to do more with him.
That’s a wrap for Cloud Reset for today. Thank you everyone for listening. We will encourage you again to please subscribe. You’re gonna find this podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
I would say look at the videos on YouTube as well. We’ve got shorts. It’s all there. It’s on Spotify. It’s on Apple Podcasts. It’s absolutely everywhere. Please subscribe. That way. You won’t miss another amazing guest that we have, and of which we have many of them lined up in the coming weeks.
