123 | The tech titans' partnership that saved rhinos

Jon Busby: So welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. Um, I'm joined, of course, in my co host seat, uh, by my fellow channel enthusiast, Amanda Fitzgerald, who's been joining us on this series, uh, of episodes so far, but I'm really excited to introduce our guest, uh, David Evert, who's channel chief, strategic alliances, partner sales and marketing, board chairman, MBA of An awful lot of incredible tech businesses over the year.

Currently part partner and CRO at a company called we go golf, which I'm sure we're going to get a chance to talk about today, but David, welcome to the tech marketing podcast.

David Evert: Thanks so much, John. And thanks Amanda for inviting me. Uh, it's a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited about the conversation we're gonna have today.

Amanda Fitzgerald: David and I were both at Red Hat. Um, we worked together for about four years after the seven I was there. We both now left Red Hat and moved on. But, uh, what drew David and I together, we used to come together for strategic meetings, work project related meetings, but somehow David, you have to jump in here.

We were always having the bigger conversation. What should we be doing with our partners? How do we elevate partner marketing within the whole, you know, 20, 000 man company? How do we shout louder without losing our voices? And we just were kindred spirits. And so when I say channel chiefs, neither one of us were the C suite.

However, we always had that passion of partners and we were always trying to change The way partners were perceived and elevate the value that partners bring. So David, I'm delighted to have you on this podcast.

David Evert: Well, correction. I am in the C suite now, um, company and call myself the CRO to get there, but Hey,

Amanda Fitzgerald: you had to make your own company to get to the C

David Evert: suite.

I mean, I call myself C suite, right? Um, yeah, no, I'll echo it. Um, I think you and I are, you know, By our own character, just sort of strategic thinkers, visionary type of folks. It keeps us from having to dirty our hands with the real work some days, which is great. Um, but I think, um, I think definitely one of the things that drew me to a career in alliances, which is most people know few careers are self directed.

They just sort of turned out to be what they become. Right. Um, and I think it was just, I was consistently Attracted to the power of a partnership, the, you know, doubling up on resources and, um, you know, working together. I think you can just achieve so much more. There's, there's levels of accountability inside of an alliance.

Um, and having shared metrics, uh, in addition to all the resources that all add up to being able to do bigger and greater things as, as an alliance than you can, as a sole company. So, um, I think we share that in common. I think that's what we liked about it. Um, and I think we're going to talk about some of the really cool stuff you can achieve in a, in a strong Alliance today.

Jon Busby: I was thinking before you said it there, actually, David, like the, cause I've ended up, I, I'm a self proclaimed channel enthusiast. Um, I've just updated my own bio to include that because I ended up being pulled in to talk about the channel, but I don't think the channel you ever choose the channel. I think it chooses you.

Um, and that's how we've all ended up in it. So actually before we dive into, and we've got an absolutely incredible story that I can't wait to unpack. But before we dive into that, like talk us through YouTube met at red hat, which was one of your kind of later positions, David, like how did you end up there?

And how did you end up in the channel? Like what's been the journey, uh, to get to, to get to where you are today?

David Evert: It's a good nuanced point, right? There's lots of different partner types and some of it is definitely the channel, some of it is alliances. Some of it is tech partnerships. And, um, you know, um, if you want to go to my LinkedIn and read my old blogs, I cover all of those.

Um, but in case, um, yeah, so, I mean, I started off in Latin America selling cable TV, hard equipment. My company got acquired by Motorola, which is fantastic. But at the time. was late nineties. Uh, the internet was just taken off. Money was falling out of the sky to, to build that. And the company I just kept working with, uh, was Cisco.

We sold cable modems. They sold all the infrastructure. So I ended up at Cisco and of all the things that Cisco is and was, I think it was, Um, very, uh, focused on being partner first. Um, they, you, you always had to make a case for why we should buy or build instead of partner. 'cause default setting was partner.

And so I think anybody who's done any time at Cisco is, um, just swimming in, in the partner waters from the beginning. Um, I did a lot of selling to telcos, John, um, around the world. So we had 141 named. Tele telephone, uh, telephone and, and telecommunications partners around the world. And as you know, kind of pre-cloud, as we were pivoting into what we refer to as managed services, my job of as a direct salesperson kind of changed.

Um, so I'm selling, let's call it, uh, Saudi Telecom, a bunch of security equipment and routers and switches, and they're buying it. And then they're gonna ostensibly sell that as managed security out to their consumers. But they don't know how to do it and they don't know how to market it and they don't know how to anything.

It's so for me as a salesperson to get that next PO, I got to figure out how they sell this stuff. So suddenly I'm doing sales trainings with them and helping them put together pitch decks and trying to build out a lead generation program for them and. Suddenly it turned out I'm partner managing them, right?

And it only got more, uh, you know, imperative to do that. Well, when we got into the cloud business and also I turned around at some point, I'm like, Hey, why do I have an overlay booking number at a, in a aggregate commission plan? I thought I was a sales guy and, um, Nope, you're a partner guy. Didn't know it, but you are to, to your point it, the channel or the partner ecosystem, I think it finds you rather than you often pursuing.

At least that was the case with me.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I think, I think, and everything you've mentioned there, I mean, we're going to jump around a lot today. I can, I can already see it, but it's still a hundred percent relevant today. Um, you know, actually I was having a conversation last week with someone from AWS and you're, you know, the same way that you would sell into a telecom is exactly the kind of alliance you need to build into the cloud now, like it, this is, this gets played over and over.

And I think one of the biggest things. I've learned that sticks out from what you've you've mentioned there is it's We kind of have a habit, especially as humans of trying to distill things down to like a process or a formula. And really with partners, it's all, every partner needs to be different. And every partner needs, uh, you know, needs a relationship based approach.

Um, and I think that, you know, really comes out of some of the stuff we're going to go into today is, is, you know, this wouldn't, wouldn't have happened if you didn't. Sit around a table together, um, and, and, and have that time.

David Evert: John, I'll double click on your specific example. One of the greatest failures in my career is try convincing just one out of those 141 telephone companies, convincing just one that they should use their infrastructure and data center and burgeoning experience in managed services.

To provide a worldwide cloud service that they as 100 year old infrastructure geniuses should have won hands down. And instead some book company built and dominates the cloud. I mean, talk about having to think about your partners individually, right? Like I would have bet a hundred times on AT& T over a bookseller.

I mean, it's actually a bit wrong every time,

Jon Busby: you know, I hadn't thought about it that way. Cause when you think about AWS or, you know, I mean, Amazon didn't start as a bookseller. They just started selling books. Cause it was a fairly simple project product to ship. They start, they wanted to become the catalog for everything, right?

The one unified catalog, but actually AWS is such an accidental, like how can you have an accidental billion dollar company like that? Just spin out of nowhere. You're right. It should have been a telco.

David Evert: Yeah.

Jon Busby: Um, At some

David Evert: point, somebody must have just turned around and said, listen, we have the world's largest data center, and none of these other companies are offering us a product that we want to buy.

We might as well just offer it.

Amanda Fitzgerald: So it's interesting. So the theme for today is leveraging partnerships. And because we, I think our listeners know who the partner ecosystem is or who their partner ecosystem is, cause it's different for, for every company and business. But the theme for today, and Dave is going to talk us through this is how do you get that magic between a vendor, a partner, and a customer.

And When that magic happens, something very, very special happens. What gets delivered to the customer as a solution becomes beyond what anyone ever expected when they start the conversation. And David's got this wonderful example where he was in the right place at the right time and you were That catalyst that drove an embryonic idea through to fruition.

So David, I'm going to let you tell the story of when you at Cisco, which partner and which customer brought this magic together.

David Evert: Yeah, Amanda, so that's great. So, um, we've talked about this a little bit, um, over the years, but, um, yeah, it was a magic time, magic place. Um, a couple of things were happening in, um, in the mid 20 teens.

So we're going to go back a little bit, um, around 2014, we at Cisco had been uh, demonstrating, uh, our capabilities around smart devices and connected homes at the 2012. Olympics, um, back in your, in your backyard in London. And as we tore down our demo house or the Cisco house, um, our largest partner at the time and worldwide system integrator data, uh, dimension data, uh, had helped us build a home and it was helping us tear it down.

And one of their customers was, uh, the world wildlife fund. Who is in the process of building out their brand new world headquarters in London. And so a little bit of, Hey, what do we do with all this equipment and how do we keep this customer happy? And, you know, I'm sure there was a tax write off in there somewhere.

We took all of that equipment from the Olympics and that along with some new purchases and some integration services that were donated by Dimension Data, we built out, um, a world class data center and back office for the World Wildlife Fund. That project was a long project, but, um, uh, around 20, in the middle of 2014, we ended up having sort of a celebratory dinner and we're toasting to all this success.

And it was interesting. One of the executives from the world wildlife fund in a more dour, um, tone just said, you know, that's great that we're patting ourselves on the back, but wouldn't it be cool? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could take all of this intelligence and technology and just, you know, smarts and focus it on solving our real problem, which is not spam and, you know, malware.

It's solving for poaching of, um, different endangered species and, and, and all the other ales, um, that they, that they suffer. Um, that would be pretty neat. And, um, and it just, it, it, it ticked a little bell in my mind because at the same time, back in Silicon Valley, we were struggling really, really hard to figure out how do we sell IOT?

We had taken a swing at like renaming the internet of things. And this is, by the way, guys, this predates the wearables. It predates your nest thermostats. This is 10 years ago. It seems like not long when you say 10, but from a technology perspective, this is eons ago. We're still just fascinated with our.

With our smartphones and the apps, right? I mean, I might've still been playing angry birds back any case. Um, we were, we were really, as a company, um, we saw the opportunity. We knew we were going to be in the world that we're in today, but how was Cisco going to be able to. Sell that idea of, okay, maybe Apple comes out with a, with a smart watch, but how does that translate into a business deal for us with a major corporation?

Like how are these devices going to work? How is a. a wireless pressure sensor in a pipeline going to, you know, avoid, um, issues for the petroleum company. I mean, you can come up with it, but it's difficult to start the conversation. It's difficult to get people excited about the conversation. And it's difficult to translate that conversation into a real business, you know, pitch.

And I'm sitting there at that dinner and I'm like, okay, I know this is ridiculously optimistic, but imagine if we used. Smart devices and internet is, uh, the internet of things to solve this problem. Just like he's suggesting we could probably garner the whole world's attention and pivot into a sales pitch like instantly, like, I know we can't, or I don't think we can, but what if we could, that would be pretty incredible.

Amanda Fitzgerald: And were you brave enough to voice that opinion at that dinner? Because we know what, we're all in IT, we know what technology can do, but to a customer, what can it do to advance their business? Desires their business needs and what you said you had that light bulb moment in an innocent dinner

David Evert: So i'll be honest.

Um No, I didn't commit to the customer something that seemed so uh, uh outlandish I did have a conversation with a gentleman by the name of mark davies He was running the relationship between cisco and dimension data for cisco in europe And he's like, that's a great idea, David. Why don't you go bird dog that?

And, um, a little bit more self effacing. I said, I will. And then I didn't.

Amanda Fitzgerald: Bird dogging meaning in, in,

David Evert: like, like be the one who points at the bird that then the hunters go after it. So I'm going to find that opportunity and I'm going to chase it down in the right direction and I'm going to get the resources to go after it.

Amanda Fitzgerald: Okay. Thank you.

David Evert: And about, I'm going to say he gave me 60 days.

And then I remember I got a call from Mark and he's like, Dave, you haven't done anything and animals are still dying. And we've got a huge opportunity that you saw and think you could do like WWF fine, but WTF, right? And I mean, honestly, I got to call him out. Like if it weren't for Mark Davies kicking me in the shorts, they're saying, Hey, you know, you've got your hands on something here.

Amanda Fitzgerald: You

David Evert: said you were going to do it, do it! And I'm not

Jon Busby: sure I would have if I hadn't been held accountable. Is that actually how the phone call went? Like, come on, it's been 60 days later. Animals are still dying, David. Yeah! I mean, he punched me right between

David Evert: the eyes.

Amanda Fitzgerald: This is why I love working with the Americans, because they just get straight to it.

You know, the Brits are far too polite.

David Evert: No, on a conference call, we spend five minutes just getting to know each other, right? It's the Europeans are like Yeah. Nice getting to know you. What have you done about saving animals?

Jon Busby: Let's actually, cause this is the bit that got us really excited when we were talking about this beforehand.

Like what you, so you, you took this equipment that was part of the 2012 deployment. Um, by the way, let's all just acknowledge we're just at the end of the Paris games. I'd like to say we did it better, but that's going to just, that's going to go down in history. Cause it's just, it's just how we deal with the French.

Um, no, it was, it was a wonderful games. Um, and, and really, really kind of. well executed on their part as well. But the, um, uh, you took this equipment, you put it into WWF's headquarters, which was, which was in London. And then this sparked this conversation. What was the, what did you end up delivering when you managed to get this, get this sold in David?

Like what's, what was the core of it?

David Evert: I got on the plane home from that second meeting. Right where I was out there in 60 days and he called me on it and I started putting together a deck because I knew that we were lucky enough to be having right in my backyard. Raleigh, North Carolina. It's the second largest campus for Cisco and the marketing leadership team was setting up, um, a, uh, an off an offsite that was on site.

So they were all coming in from around the world and they were meeting in Raleigh instead of San Jose. And they were going to have a cocktail party that evening for all of us underlings, which was really, really quite kind of them. And, uh, I put together my two or three, uh, point pitch deck. Um, and I talked about, uh, saving elephants who are by the way, also being, being killed for their tusks.

Plus I think elephants are cute. I just kind of thought it was, it was nice, um, getting ahead of myself and where we're heading with this story is going to be rhinos, but at the time. I thought elephants were cuter. And, uh, so I started pitching this what if story and they're like, you know, just like every pitch, right?

State the problem. We have a huge opportunity as a company. It's going to be, uh, you know, a billion dollar business for us, but we can't get people off their seats. We can't get people to want to pay attention. We don't know how to have this conversation. If we could do something simple, like work with our chip manufacturer, partner at Intel, put together like a bracelet or a collar for these elephants tractor motions.

I don't know what, but if we could figure this out, we'd have something that would garner everyone's interest. And a little bit of a history lesson, you know, that was. That was a topic, a big topic at the time. There was a, um, there was a dentist, a famous, famous story in the news, a dentist from Minnesota that had, um, shot some, uh, Cecil the lion.

Uh, it turned out he had paid for a government approved permit, um, but it made, you know, world headlines. This. You know, dentist from Minnesota, flying to Zimbabwe and shooting this lion. Um, and then at the same time, there was the, um, Northern, uh, black rhino. There was one male Northern black rhino alive. It was being guarded by, uh, three soldiers with, um, automatic weapons 24, seven in the hopes that under those extreme circumstances, it would mate.

Spoiler alert and sad news, it didn't. So there are several subspecies of rhinos, but the northern black rhino is gone for good. Just gone. And gone because they're being killed in, you know, ridiculous numbers for the rhino horn, which is considered in some cultures to be value as a supplement for rhinos.

You know, different purposes. Um, not proven by any medical studies whatsoever, uh, just sort of a cultural belief. So there's a demand side to this problem that is yet unsolved, right? We were working on how can we solve for the supply side, right? So there's this moment in time when a world topic is around endangered species poaching, uh, You know, all of this illegality, there's a problem we have.

And so that's what I'm pitching to these marketers. The entire world's eye is on this problem right now. We have the potential of solving it with really cool technology that, Oh, by the way, we can't garner the interest that this story has garnered nor a use case that, that proves how powerful this technology will eventually be.

To then get the 30 minutes to say, Oh, by the way, you can do this, this, and that. So it went well. We got some resources. Um, we had a stealth mode, university focused technology group that was always exploring brand new technologies. They had a bunch of PhDs from Stanford and things like that. They, they loaned us a few engineers, myself and the other person, uh, Steve McGar, who I worked with, uh, managing the partnership.

Um, and a couple other folks, uh, Dave Ward, uh, who has now moved on to be CEO of a number of other companies, was running that stealth mode, um, piece. We all got on some planes and, uh, headed down to the headquarters of Dimension Data, which conveniently, and not surprisingly with the way things were going, is in, um, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Amanda Fitzgerald: So did, so did the, did the selection of the partner, obviously it was in their territory, was that kind of like preordained, or it just so happened, as you say, the endangered species side of the solution was based in Africa, the partner was based in Africa, so was that alliance between the customer, Cisco and partner, was that That already existed.

David Evert: It did, but what I don't want your listeners to come away with was, oh, well, this minuscule little partner in South Africa, of course they were engaged with the World Wildlife Fund because they're out there in Africa with lions. Dimension Data at the time was our largest channel partner. Responsible for 7 percent of our sales.

They had operations that yes, we're headquartered out of South Africa because that's where they started, but it covered all of Asia. And really what they did was kind of like wherever Cisco was direct sales force was really strong. They kind of weren't. Very strong. They were there, but they weren't real strong.

And where we were kind of weak, Asia, Middle East, Africa, they were really strong. They had brought a company called data craft to get their feet in the Asia door. They eventually were acquired by NTT, obviously, you know, huge, Worldwide system integrator, um, from Asia. So, um, yeah, they were massive. They were second only to Cisco's internal sales force in sales.

And in fact, when I left the partnership, they were responsible for over 3 billion in revenue for, for Cisco. So they were huge. And they just happened to be in South Africa, which is, there's an interesting story that goes with that one too, that I can, that I can diverge into, but I know we're halfway through the podcast.

Amanda Fitzgerald: That's for another day. So talk to me about how that solution. Got incubated and got developed into a deliverable solution for WWF.

David Evert: We had the right resource. We didn't have a huge number of resources. We had the right resources, and we had the right focus. Um, and we also had a, a, another really lucky benefit.

One of the founders of Dimension Data was a landowner in the Sabi Sands Game Reserve. It's the Sabi Sands Game Reserve is, um, a premier reserve right next to Kruger National Park, but where as a landowner, think of your neighborhood homeowners association or a condo association, uh, the 33 landowners within that reserve, whose purpose really is to preserve those animals.

And there's, it's very, very regulated as to how many visitors are allowed to come into that reserve at any given time and how many vehicles can be out on the disturbing the animals, very, very much of a conservation focused reserve. Um, as a landowner, he was able to, you know, garner the interest and permission of everyone for us to come in and take a look at how they're currently fighting poaching and how we thought we could.

Improve it. And so we get out there, um, to the Sabi Sands Reserve. It's a, uh, it's a fenced reserve. You know, we had all these ideas of putting, you know, um, net guards and things like that. We'd already now pivoted our thoughts towards rhinos. There were a couple issues with putting devices on. One, um, rhinos are a very tough critter, right?

And they can, they can be very tough on equipment, right? So, uh, there had been attempts to do that and they'd been, you know, uh, anything external, they could rip off one way or the other. Um, there'd been ideas about putting a chip in the horn, right? But you're causing trauma to the animal. And the real problem was, uh, Great.

You know, we can measure their heart rate and detect if they're, you know, all of a sudden they go into a panic and things like that, and then go try to incur. But the reality is you're detecting the poaching as it's happening and not really preventing it. And you can catch one poacher, but it's a little bit like the war on drugs, right?

You take one trafficker out and another one takes his place. So we needed to figure out something better. And, um, I'll cut to the chase. What we figured out were really two things. There were two ways that poachers got into the reserve. One way is they would actually cut through the fence line and they would get in, and that's the sexier of the solution, so I'll save that for the second one.

The other way that they would get in is work crews. So you might have a pickup truck with 18 workers and all of their bags of tools, and they would come in to repair thatched roofing. Work on, you know, um, whatever, right? You have 33 landowners with buildings and outbuildings and lodges and all that sort of thing.

You get a pickup truck with 18 guys stuffed in the back of it, go off to a worksite, and when it comes out, there's 17, do you notice? And then the truck comes back the next day with 17 and 18 leave. And that 18th in his bag of tools. Is a rhino horn and nobody knew it. So one of the things we did was just really track that.

Well, so we put in biometrics, um, it wasn't about, you know, anything with you, you could fake a credential, you could fake a pass card, all that kind of stuff, but we actually put in, you know, fingerprint hand biometrics, facial recognition, type of the stuff so that we, you know, we could control that part of who is coming in and coming up.

That was pretty good. Um, the other one I think is really cool. What we did is we did, we actually did the devices. So we put motion detecting devices on the fence line all around the park at fixed distances. We used at that time, LIDAR, which was a very new, um, transmission protocol for, um, low energy. And it was all for, you know, it was so that you could use devices that didn't need to have so much energy to produce such a strong signal.

And then basically you could, uh, biangulate, so we can all think about triangulate, you know, find where somebody is from a bunch of angles. Since we're only talking about two dimensions, it's a fence line, it was biangulate. Um, and along with that ability and the unique digital vibrational signature of someone snipping a wire, We could identify exactly that a wire had been cut and within a meter because of by angulation where that wire was cut.

Uh, and I don't mean like a current wire. I mean like the actual, you know, chain link fence wire. And by the time a poacher had snipped his very first snip, We could be sending an alert to a helicopter crew to go in and intercede, um, on that incursion. Um, whereas that helicopter was usually used to just run patrols and hope for the best.

And obviously things are happening at night. So it's difficult to see. And it's a, just, it's a case of resources. You know, if we had 20 helicopters, that would work fine. Um, the great news is they went from. Uh, I believe they had had, I think they were averaging in that very small reserve, two poachings a month to zero.

It immediately stopped. Um, they were able to catch poachers before they'd actually cut through the fence. Um, there, the government had some very aggressive, how you can deal with poachers. When they're caught. Um, so yeah, they stopped the incursions immediately with that technology, which is pretty exciting

Jon Busby: from two to zero.

That's amazing. Um, I mean, yeah, I was gonna ask like, what impact did it have? But to be able to call that out? Um, how? How many times? How many trips did it take out there to build these? To build these solutions.

David Evert: So we took two trips out, but I got to be honest, dimension data ended up working on that solution on a more consistent basis.

We went back with whatever we needed to do with hardware designs and things like that. Um, uh, I would say it happened over the course of about 60 days, what we decided on, what we deployed and what we were able to shut down. So, like I said, we had, we had few resources, but very smart and dedicated resources.

And then, um, and then honestly, so, so we solved that problem. We hadn't really solved Cisco's problem, but the agreement with our CMO was if you can, if you can really solve this problem, if I can get in front of press and not be lying, when I say we have, eliminated poaching. If you can really solve the problem, then we're game.

And, um, we ended up, we ended up, uh, God, I would say the entire global marketing team at our back, um, when this happened.

Amanda Fitzgerald: So once the solution got delivered, they then turned it into a halo campaign. And

David Evert: I don't, I don't want to misinterpret. I mean, it's not that they weren't So, uh, we're going to start rooting for us and providing us the resource we'd asked for.

It was like, when this is real, then we're going to go for it. We, so what we ended up doing from a business perspective is we decided to build our banner campaign. So I don't mean like a lead generation campaign with Dimension, I mean our global, you know, on ESPN during the final four, you know, I'm sorry, I just

Amanda Fitzgerald: said a bunch of

David Evert: American things.

Amanda Fitzgerald: It's a huge success story. Absolutely. Yeah.

David Evert: We're going to do our, our big brand campaign around. There's never been a better time. Our lead story is going to be to save the rhinos. They went out to the field to try to find five more stories, which they did. So it became our brand campaign. It was the first brand campaign that we'd ever launched with a partner.

You know, it's your brand campaign is about you. But again, I'll go back to partners were so ingrained as the way we went to market and they were so important for this, that we decided for the first time ever to involve, um, you know, the by name dimension data and our other partnerships have them be able to leverage that brand campaign in their regions.

Um, we had those other stories. And, um, you know, I don't know exactly how we measured the massive success of, of that brand campaign, but it did solve the problems I talked about. We were suddenly, you know, right in the epicenter of smart devices. IOT and what we ended up calling connected and any number of other things and this became connected conservation.

Um, there is a foundation around connected conservation now. Um, I don't want to look down to my notes, but I will say if I remember my notes well, we have now deployed that solution in over 50 parks and the whole idea. And what's beautiful about it is that, um, we've created safe havens. For these species.

So when the demand side does disappear, the supply side to, to repopulate will be there and we do it without ever touching the animals, without ever, you know, stressing them. Uh, and we're doing it all across Africa and we're doing it for other, you know, there's a lot of other species that benefit from that, um, that could be poached as well.

Like elephants, like lions, um, that, you know, it's a safe Haven. It's not rhinos only.

Jon Busby: It was going to be. I mean, you've answered kind of all my questions there, David, which is it was going to obviously you've done this one park. Like, was there was this a standard? It sounds like it's a standard that's now been accepted across all the other conservation and probably safari parks globally.

Um, I mean, so, so. I'm going to jump in while I got so excited to ask you about this story earlier. Of course, our logo together is the Rhino. We

Amanda Fitzgerald: didn't know that when we booked David.

Jon Busby: No, we didn't. Um, and then, and it's obviously it's more, more specifically, it's the Rhino and the Oxbecker. So if you can see behind me, I've got the Rhino and the Oxbecker over here, um, to demonstrate those symbiotic relationships we have in the ecosystem, in the channel when, you know, when we develop partnerships.

Um, and we of course have done work with Save the Rhino. So everything here ticks a load of boxes that I know of. A lot of my team are going to be incredibly passionate about. So the fact that you're able to take, and this, to be honest, David, I got so excited when you told me this story last week, I immediately called the rest of the senior leadership team to be like, you've got to speak to this guy.

It's amazing. Um, because this took not only the, not only technology and brings it to life in a way that, saves animals, um, as, as your colleague said, but also brings to life some of those business relationships and why partnerships are so important, why that ecosystem is so important as part of it. Like it's, this is probably one of the best examples of a, um, An ESG campaign that really demonstrated ESG probably downsells it, but demonstrates good of what we can do with technology, um, for our planet.

So, I mean, David, thank you for sharing so much of that with it. Well, I do want to just

David Evert: underscore one thing, you know, it's great what we accomplished from a, from a, you know, environmental ecological perspective. But if we didn't think we could make a buck doing it, we never would have done it. And I think that's a good thing.

I truly believe that philanthropy and charitable efforts are unsustainable if they're just done out of the goodness of your heart, because times get tough and sometimes you got to prioritize. Other things in your life than being nice. The great thing about greed is it never goes away. It's always, it's always very strong.

And I'm not saying it was a bunch of greedy capitalists that were like, Hey, if we've got to save a Rhino to make a buck, then do it. That wasn't the attitude, but we were able to bring the resources and actually come to a solution and deliver that solution because of what it was going to do for us in the short term from a marketing perspective.

But also what it meant for perimeter defense, for military complexes, construction, um, sites, um, factories, industrial parks, all around the world. You know, physical perimeter defense using smart devices was all of a sudden a massive market for Cisco, right? A huge use case, which meant, Hey, let's do more of this, right?

So I'm always a big believer in coupling. I say greed for effect. Couple greed with charity and you have created a sustainable machine to change the world.

Jon Busby: The, the one question I've, there's so much that I want to dig into in this, we're definitely going to run out of time. Um, but one thing that, that immediately jumps out, like this was something that, you know, Originally, it sounded like Cisco, well, actually you and Dimension Data and WWF, so Cisco, Dimension Data and the charity, all working together.

Like, how, how did, I'm trying to think of the right way of thinking, like, how did you justify, was the partner just as passionate about it and they made this happen? Or how did you justify the partner's involvement throughout this campaign? Like, how did it, how did that come together?

David Evert: Well, I'll be honest, and this is back to the power of Google, of the partnerships.

We had a very large volume purchase agreement that generated joint marketing funds and sales incentive funds because of the sheer size of our business. So, you know, we had some resources to work with. I think it just, it came together because We had those generic resources. We had that unique problem.

This was a great way to solve it. The partner had the wherewithal to, you know, being based in South Africa. I mean, Amanda said it so well at the beginning, it was a little bit of everything being set in place at the right time. And, and then a really smart person, um, telling me to go do something with all of that, uh, all of these pieces, put that puzzle together.

But I think more generically. I don't think that's unique. I think a really good channel person or partner ecosystem person, that's effectively what they're doing. I think the hallmarks of a, of a great Alliance leader is one really understanding what the other half of the Alliance thinks of as success.

Right. Honestly, it's like any relationship, you know, if you're married or whatever, If you have that person's, um, needs and wants and dreams. In the forefront of your mind, um, you're, you're, you are an ally. You are there to help them even when they can't see the way maybe that they can be helped. So I think having that mindset and that's a mindset I learned on that partnership, not that I brought to that partnership.

So I learned it from a lot of other people. And there were a lot of people involved in this aspect of it. And there were lots of aspects to that partnership as well, but learning that. Um, and then learning to just look for the value in the scene. There are these little, like I said, you know, there's over, over and cross connects that really make the partnership powerful where what they're good at.

And you're good at just happened to create this unique little recipe. While we maybe came together because we were covering North America and we needed a partner that could cover Asia. Um, and the Venn diagram initially had a very small bit of overlap from a sales coverage perspective. We also figured out that that overlap created some really powerful like I say, you know seams And if you can find the value in the seam in a partnership That's when you can really really take off in a way that nobody else can so ours was great for this You know a partnership between I don't know apple and their battery supplier might have, you know, a really unique seam as well, you know, but finding that value in the seam that benefits both of the, the, the metrics that those companies are going for.

Now you've got a recipe for success.

Amanda Fitzgerald: Can I also make an observation? Um, Many times when you come together in person, as you say, you were taking down the Olympic, um, 2012 Olympic, um, hardware when you're physically in the same space, it's valuable to have these broader discussions. So yes, you had a job to do.

You had a very specific job to do, take it down. reallocate the equipment. It's when you're in that physical space together that you get these light bulb moments where you say, what if you mentioned it? What if we don't limit the conversation to just the back office? What if we look at the core business of WWF?

What is the core business need you're trying to solve for? And how can we help you? That is that light bulb moment. So it's not just the inertia on how do we build the solution. It's actually having face time with your part. I've never managed a partner directly. I've always been back office. I've always been in marketing.

You've had the pleasure of managing partner relationships. And I think that's what I want to tease out in this discussion. What is the

David Evert: power of

Amanda Fitzgerald: managing your partner?

David Evert: I, anybody listening, I'm sure can relate to this. You spend a

two weeks before quarterly business review, you start working on the agenda and then you start working on the joint templates and what are we going to report on and then you're going and getting the numbers and you're preparing your reports and all like that. And you go through in my world, it was generally marketing business.

Sales and tech. Right. So the overall business, so yeah. And you've got this, you know, it's not a, it's not a completely scripted QBR, but I mean, it better be very scripted. You better not show up, not knowing what you want to talk about. Right. And you spend the whole day and yeah, you go to dinner afterwards and invariably the conversation, somebody says today was great, but you know what?

And then all of a sudden all this stuff comes out that. You know, maybe we didn't want to say in that public forum while we were on the zoom call and it was being recorded, you know, the real problems, you know, you know, the crux of our issue isn't this, it's this, you know, it can be the problems we really got to solve or the opportunities we really have at hand, but it's, I'm telling you, that only happens at dinner.

And, you know, we talked about this earlier.

Amanda Fitzgerald: And it only happens face to face, you know, building those relations and building trust for them to open up to you because they're not going to say in public forum. This is what's really a pain point for us. This is what's really gonna push us forward. This is what our customers are really asking us for, but nobody is brave enough to have those conversations in open forum because that's not the place to have those conversations.

The place to have those conversations is in a safe place where you can throw out weird and wonderful ideas. It's brainstorming, the old fashioned brainstorming. Only one out of ten ridiculous ideas will land. But you have to have built the trust, created that safe space, and it can happen. What did you say about the napkins?

David Evert: Yeah, the executive hallways of Silicon Valley are adorned with framed cocktail napkins. That is just a thing, the whole concept of MPLS and virtual private networking is on a napkin at, in building 10 on, on Cisco way in San Jose, like in the, the world headquarter building, um, and they're all over, right?

There's a million stories about that cocktail napkin and it is, um, I mean, I'll be honest. I, I, I can't forget sitting with doc, uh, doc Watkins. He's, uh, he was one of the founders of dimension data, the landowner there. And we're up at six in the morning, getting ready to go on a game ride. And he's sitting there making egg salad sandwiches and coffee while he's going to drive the Jeep.

This guy NTT had already orchestrated the purchase of dimension data. We're talking about a billionaire and he's down there. We're making egg salad sandwiches together, you know, and we're talking about this, this problem and the solution and the real opportunity. Yeah, that'd be. I think it was over, you know, in those dark, pre sunrise hours over egg salad sandwiches that he really got the confidence that this, this guy from Raleigh, North Carolina is not going to stop until we solve this.

So I now feel more comfortable putting all of my resources in it. Um, and you know, I could do all the PowerPoint presentations I wanted to, but until he met me, saw me, felt the energy and the passion and the tenacity. I mean, if you know anything about me, Amanda, you know, if I get after something, I'm like a dog on a bone, right?

I think he saw that and he's like, you know what, this guy may not be connected to John Chambers like I am, you know, the C, the 25 year veteran CEO of Cisco, but he's not going to let go of this. I mean, I've got a guy fighting in my corner. I can get John on a call. What I can't get is, is, is this. And all of that was learned, you know, in the kitchen of his house in the middle of the South, uh, African Bush.

Amanda Fitzgerald: But relationships. Relationships matter. We're, we're all in IT. Yes, the IT, the technology will deliver the solution. You, you've talked about what the solution entailed. It was the internet of things, you know, it's the, it's, it's getting all the devices working and, you know, Solving the business need, but without those relationships, the relationship that you built with your partner, the relationship you, you were representing Cisco to that partner, the relationship that you built with WWF.

Sorry, not you, the team. What I'm trying to tease out here is humans buy from humans. The technology is the solution, but without the human bonding, that bonding that you had with your partner, the bonding, you know, envisaging, developing that idea, this is the idea, but how do we develop the solution? All of that is human interactions.

And what I'm trying to tease out here is in partner ecosystem world, which is where we all sit, those human, those conversations are key. Any, any solution success?

Jon Busby: It's, it's actually, it's actually a little more than that, Amanda, if you take it right back, right? So I'm a technologist at my heart, right? So I get excited about tech, but one thing I've learned throughout that and through my experience in, on the marketing side, and especially now with AI, this is even more important is you've got to start with the problem.

And then find the right technology for that problem. You didn't start with a Cisco sensor. Right. You know, that could do a certain thing. You know, you started with a problem, which is, you know, these, these rhinos are being poached, then you brought people and relationships together in order to deliver something.

And it just happened that technology was, was one of the right answers.

David Evert: And by the way, it wasn't the technology we thought we had in mind. The, the, the, the putting a device on a rhino was not the right solution. So had we gone at it double barreled on technology, we would have failed. Did

Jon Busby: you actually develop new, essentially entirely new pieces of hardware in those 60 days?

David Evert: I would argue that we took from our public sector some of the weather hardened gear, and I would say the solution was new for sure. The piece parts of the solution, with the exception of using LiDAR as the communication, uh, protocol, I'm not sure that anything was ultra new. Um, it was, how do we take something that's worked in another environment, reduce the voltage requirements, right?

Cause you're, you don't, you can't plug these things in on a fence. They've got to be solar powered. Um, so that's what drove LIDAR. Voltage. So, I mean, yes, but we were, the other thing is, you know, I'll bring back Dave Ward's team that was working in our sort of skunk works, you know, university, academia environment.

He had his eyes on a whole lot of new up and coming technologies. And that's why he, He, his team members were involved was we knew we needed to find some cutting edge stuff, so I don't know if we had productized exactly all of it either, but the technology was there, right? We didn't, we didn't design or discover anything new to solve for it.

We just put a puzzle together that that had never been built.

Jon Busby: Yeah, just, just casually put a puzzle together that went, took two poachers down a week to zero and say, and secured 50 different, um, uh, convention reserves, like just a tiny puzzle that has just now probably saved a huge amount of animal life.

Um, like that's

David Evert: the, that's the inspiration we started with, right? The great thing about being an Alliance leader for these huge companies, I mean, I didn't do it. All I did was nag people until they did it, right? You can't, there's nobody to nag if you're not managing an alliance with multiple teams and all that.

I mean, like that is a great thing. It's what every manager loves, right? That I spend 40 hours nagging and I get, you know, 400 hours of productivity out of it, you know, being a little bit self effacing, but. Yeah, I mean, that's, that is the power of partnerships. It's where we started today, um, is the ability to inspire and engage resources to solve problems vastly beyond your ability to, to approach.

Jon Busby: Uh, I want to bring a I, I want to reluctantly start to bring us to a close here for our listeners. Um, like if we were, this has been such an inspiring story, David, like if you were to condense it down to the individual pieces that made this a success, um, to try and recreate again, like what would be, what would be the different components that would form that?

David Evert: Um, I think you've got to be able to step back and look at the larger picture. We talked about horizon two, horizon three in Cisco. You know, you've got to have those ideas at the top of your mind. Those are driven by, again, what really does your partner need to achieve to be successful? And what are you trying to achieve to be successful and then keeping while you're working on horizon one.

38 hours out of the week. You need to have two hours of the week that you're thinking of horizon two, horizon three. So that's gotta be top of mind so that when this opportunity is presented to you and then represented to you, cause you were too lazy to work on it. Um, you identify it, you see it and say, Hey, this, there've been these things.

Swirling about that. We needed to address at some point back burner items if you want to call them that and this actually has a shot at solving it. Right? So keep that horizon three in mind. Identify opportunities to build towards horizon three when you see them. Um, be able to recruit the resources. I mean, the whole world is communication, right?

And even double up on that in alliances. How do I communicate in their language against the metrics they're trying to solve for and are being, you know, measured on? How this Horizon 3 is gonna be our Horizon 1 in two years, right? Um, to then get the resources behind it. Um, and then I think a lot of it's just trust the team, you know, once, once you, I mean, that's good management, right?

Give people direction on what you want to accomplish, put the right people in the driver's seats to get there and then step back and let them figure out if I should be taking a left or a right. I mean, my wife always asks me, why are you going this way? I'm like, cause Google told me, and I don't know what Google knows, but it knows something.

It, it told me not to take the way I normally go because there's probably an ax in order to use that lesson. Let your people, you know, pick the right path and the right tactics to, to, to solve for the vision. Um, and yeah, I mean, I'll probably add into it, celebrate a lot when you succeed. And make a lot of noise too, right?

I mean, this, we did you, to this day, you can Google connected conservation and you'll see. Websites and videos. And there's a foundation that carries this work on from the philanthropic side, because at some point Cisco and dimension data had to say, okay, this is great, but we've got to, got to get it, get back to business, get a foundation, you know, carry on the good work here.

But, you know, it's, it's, it's not worth doing something great. If nobody knows you did it. And I'm not saying for breaking rights, I mean, no, one's going to buy the solution if they don't hear about it. Right. So celebrate and, um, and, and prophesy, I don't know.

Jon Busby: No, I, I think celebrates really a key part of the relationship piece as well.

Like I say, we're so productive here in England and on the UK, sorry, because of our pubs. Like we have the culture of going out and solving problems together over a drink and doing riding on a napkin, just as we talked about before. Um, and so I don't think we do that enough in the world, in the world anymore.

So. David, it's been, I mean, Amanda, have you got any, have you, have you got any final, we could keep going with questions, by the way, for the next couple of hours.

Amanda Fitzgerald: We could keep going, but I just wanted to finish up. What was your nickname, David, on the project?

David Evert: My codename was actually Oxpecker, just like the framed picture behind you, John.

Um, because I was, I was this nagging little bird picking off the bugs on the back of the rhino that in effect is going to help that rhino. So, um, yeah, I was sort of like the least powerful person on the team, right? But I was the one that just kept pecking away at trying to save this rhino and that's what brought all the resources together.

So, yeah, I, I'm going to say I earned. I earned codename Oxpecker.

Amanda Fitzgerald: But isn't that crazy? Because Together's logo has got an Oxpecker sitting on a rhino before we even booked David to talk about Save the Rhino. That's just blown my mind. It was meant to be. So thank you David for sharing your story, for giving light and light and colour to the power of partners.

David Evert: Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I, I love this story. It's, uh, I, I am unabashed about saying it's, it's the peak of my career. I don't suspect I'll ever do anything as amazing. And I was only able to do it because we were partnered together with two powerful companies and some really smart people. So thanks for letting me tell the story.

I enjoyed telling it.