Sippin' Tech Stories: CDI's SAs Dive into Episode 15 with Kyle Wiley!

In the 15th episode of SAs and IPAs, hosts Kyle Mullin and Rob Owen are joined by special guest Kyle Wiley for an engaging and lively discussion. The trio explores various topics, showcasing their unique perspectives and experiences in the world of technology and solutions architecture.

The episode kicks off with an entertaining revelation – a customized elf photo of Kyle Mullin that has everyone in stitches. The hosts dive into a beer review of Iron Hill Brewery's Philly Favorite IPA, sharing their thoughts on its taste and design, with witty banter and candid opinions.

As the conversation unfolds, the SAs touch on their diverse career paths, from early experiences in the industry to their current roles. They highlight the collaborative culture at CDI and discuss how individuals with different backgrounds and skills can find their place within the organization. Kyle Mullin and Rob Owen share anecdotes about CDI team members, including a delightful story about a colleague's unexpected journey from Business Development Representative to a Microsoft Licensing Solutions Architect.

The hosts also touch on the importance of adaptability and continuous learning, emphasizing how CDI's culture fosters growth and development. The episode is not just about technology; it delves into the personalities and dynamics that make CDI a unique and supportive workplace.

As the episode concludes, the hosts rate the beer and playfully critique its generic qualities, offering listeners a light-hearted and entertaining perspective on their beverage of choice.

Join Kyle Mullin, Kyle Wiley, and Rob Owen for an insightful and amusing episode that combines technology talk, career anecdotes, and beer reviews in the signature style of SAs and IPAs.

00:00 - Intro and Welcome

02:17 - The Hosts' Journey to CDI

03:06 - Career Progression and Learning Experiences

05:18 - The Value of Diverse Experiences in Pre-Sales

16:54 - Gifts and Beers

21:12 - Conclusion and Cheers

Transcript

Welcome to SAs and IPAs presented by CDI studios. 

Hi, and welcome to the Live Casino and Hotel for the CDI annual holiday party. Here we are. Beautiful. Two very handsome gentlemen here with me today. The Kyle's as they're known internally at CDI. we're gonna have a really awesome chat today, I think.

And I think, we got to start off with a little house keeping, right. 

Housekeeping, yeah. 

So obviously our normal host is missing. So we've been reviewing the data and it just, hasn't been working out. and every time Kyle and I are on the show, 

the ratings are 

sky high, all joking aside, Mike's under the weather.

So the show must go on. So here we are, in the Live casino and hotel. it's going to be a big party tonight, we have a live band, yeah, it's going to be a really great time, we're in this kind of mobile studio, thanks Spence out in the booth for, setting us up out here in the casino, I wanted to do a live on the casino floor, but, 

they probably won't allow 

some, yeah, they just were like, it seems ridiculous, but, here we are nonetheless.

Before we do get started though, Kyle, I, brought some, Christmas gifts for you here. So if you guys don't mind, 

I do enjoy a nice Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. 

I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take the escalator down. 

Oh my god, better be good. 

here we have a Kyle Mullin candy cane doll. 

This is great.                                                                                   

You can, either give it to your new son, which, congratulations.

Kyle's just become a father, 

Thank you very much. John James Mullin. John James. My son. 

Yeah, Or you can just give it to your dog. That would work as well. 

Thank you. Is there anything else? 

yeah, I figured I'd have to bring something that would smooth over. giving you the weird candy cane.

So I brought you like red wine. 

So this is beautiful. Thank you. 

Yeah, Really? Yeah. So 

see that, 

I didn't know you were going to be here, so I didn't bring you anything, yeah, I would have brought you the cowboy hat so you could totally officially finish off the Rip look from the Yellowstone. anyway, so we're here today.

I think we were going to talk about the progression, and I think a lot of. And I think that's really important because a lot of us look at our careers and we think, okay, where do we come from? It's, a part of your story, if you will. And, I think the more I thought about it, the three of us have a lot in common, but we also have some things that I think are, unique and variant in the, conversation.

And, obviously I think I'm the oldest one here. So I started in a different era. So you could look at that as one. Very close in age you guys started in the same at the same time frame. 

He's far bigger than I am 

He's far larger. I should've gotten you one of those. 

I need a little stepping stool like my mustache up 

There's a lot of facial hair on this show. 

I'm wearing cowboy boots.

I'm like three inches taller than I normally am which is not helping you 

This is awesome. 

At least we didn't put you in the middle. 

That would've been worse so anyway, I really got started in the late nineties and I'm more on the operation side. I, and I dabbled along the way as I transitioned into kind of the, solutions architect land or back in the day we used to call sales engineering.

There was still quite a bit of hands on work and it was very, very focused and specific. everybody had to have a PhD in whatever their 

specialist 

specialization was. so I don't know, like Kyle, I know your career has been- this Kyle. Your career has been pretty heavy with CDI. you've spent most- 

pretty heavy, 

all of my entire, the entirety, how many years is it now? 14? 15? 

What's today's date?

December what? We're the sixth? January 4th will be 16 years full time out of college. 2009, does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, so I started, I think we talked about this on one of the earlier episodes, if not the first, right? I was, an exception at CDI. There were no internships. I was at college. 

We do internships pretty well now.

Now we do. Yeah. back then it was a disaster. It's improved a lot. but yeah, I was interning. I was basically help desk doing password resets, laptop imaging here. And then, I really liked the people, the culture. I loved my manager at the time. and I said, Hey, listen, this is the place I want to be after I graduate.

I was going for a bachelor's in engineering and didn't want to do the coding and the development sitting behind a desk, took a technical consultant role here at CDI, did that for about. Three and a half years, right when VMware started getting hot back then, right? 2010, 2011, right when everybody started virtual, virtualizing their servers.

And then I jumped into account management role, got the sales skill sets up to par, if you will. And then, jumped over to this under SA, under your team. So it's been a wild ride. 

Yeah. And so for you, Kyle, the other Kyle. your journey is a little different because you spent a bunch of time in this kind of like specialization realm as it relates to ServiceNow and now a much wider skill set in digital in general, but, talk, tell us a little bit about I think you always had that goal, right?

Your goal in mind was always to get Where you're on the track that you're on now, not to say you've, finished where you are. Hopefully not. 

No. 

we'll work on that. but in all seriousness, you, had a longterm strategy, which I think the dichotomy here is like your strategy was more, I wanted to stay at this company and find the right role for myself.

Not necessarily having the end in mind, your kind of strategy was more with the end in mind. And then, as a jumping stone to go forward, probably further in your career, right? 

Yeah. So my, my background similar to Kyle's actually, I was doing whatever I could out of college to get into an IT field, the IT field somehow.

And I landed a job as, a help desk technician. So my first exposure, same thing, help desk tech. Something I don't think is talked about enough from that role that I actually didn't realize until a few months ago when I was talking to my old boss was. I learned a ton of customer service experience in that role and dealing with challenging customers in that role.

It was physicians, doctors. I worked for a healthcare organization. being able to keep your cool and in situations where you're dealing with challenging people, which is what we sometimes deal with in our jobs, 

of course, 

it's a skills that I didn't even really attest back to, that role, but it's, I think I got a lot out of that moving into the ServiceNow experience that Rob mentioned.

I was a platform owner, did a lot of the development. On the platform, managed it for a while. I was never a great coder. I knew that wasn't something I wanted to do. I was really good at, speaking with the, business stakeholders within the organization and understanding their technical challenges.

Taking that back to the really smart guys and being able to articulate that and then solve that business. 

Did you feel, cause not not to interrupt you, but I think it's a salient point where you're at this point in your career. I also worked in a, not a help desk, but my first job I was lucky enough after a couple of internships to land in a level two help desk, which was more of the, infrastructure and software related versus like people.

the customer service side of it, but we still had, CIOs and everything calling us. And I always attribute, and I've definitely said this on other podcasts. Nobody watched them. If Mike was hosting, but if he wasn't, then you might've heard it. the, the downtime that came with that job, because I wasn't necessarily- had users calling me all day. They were like users of the platform or the software. and in my case it was all, servers and, storage related. I had a lot of downtime to study and I like guilt tripped myself into being like, I didn't study enough of this when I was in college.

College is such a wide, broad experience that you don't really, unless you go into like secondary, go for your master's or like a PhD, you never get into really studying that much more unless you force yourself to, there's nobody saying you got to take a test on Friday, right?

So I guilted myself into taking all these tests. So I guess the question is, did you feel like that point in your career, other than the customer service experience, did you have did you have that kind of I gotta, now I really got to buckle down and study. Like I felt like it really gave me a kick in the pants when I started my first job.

Absolutely. for me, college was, tough to focus in general. Cause I played sports and when I stopped playing sports, I was like, I don't really have my why anymore. It took me a while to get that back. 

What sport did you play in? 

Basketball. 

Oh, wow. Yeah. I would've guessed football.

Wouldn't you? 

I would have absolutely. 

I was a lot smaller in high school. What buck 85 soaking wet. 

Shooting guard? 

Yep. And shooting guard, high school. Yep. 

How's the jumper today, Spencer? 

it's pretty rusty. 

It feels like we should have had a little mini basketball. Like we could have done like a little side thing, like they do on Jimmy Fallon, where these guys take jump shots.

We got to up our production. We got to up the production, Spence. 

I'll come up with a three point shooting contest. 

Three point shooting contest. In the parking lot of Parsippany. That'd be awesome. 

But yeah, so after I, after I started working there, I did have a lot of downtime. I worked second shift for a while, so I had time to study.

My boss actually approached me about the job. She said, Hey, I think your personality, you'd be really good at managing this platform. So she pushed me into it. and, I knew I wasn't great at certain things. So I took the time to learn JavaScript and then I was trying to learn the ins and outs of the platform.

And I started to find things in college that related to my job that I didn't have before, because I didn't have that experience. I got, pretty, proficient at the platform. It's something I really enjoyed. I wanted a team put around me. So what I'm doing now is what my aspirations were back then.

it wasn't in the cards at the time company wasn't fully bought into that strategy yet. So I started looking elsewhere. So I job hopped a couple places, did implementations for a long time. So did, implementations for a couple of companies. On the delivery side, before making my way to CDI and, my first exposure at CDI was as a Service Delivery Manager on our NextGen practice.

So 

With Brian Del Cid. 

Exactly. 

So Brian Del Cid, so everybody knows, was recruited as a platform owner. When, we first started building the practice, I was charged with going out and finding SAs. And, I had this philosophy and Kyle and I had been through this a bunch beforehand.

Obviously we had a very mature data center practice for years before that, where we had a lot of discussions about, do we just go try to find somebody who's got all the experience we want? And we really challenged ourselves, I think, at that moment to say, let's prove the model actually works and let's go find somebody who's got a customer experience.

And, really for me, it was story. It was like, and Brian came to the table with a really good customer platform. He came from Striker. I think if I'm not mistaken, and, very massive environment. And I was like, listen, we're part of the value to you coming in, doing this new role. So we're going to teach you what you talked about for, what you got thrown into the fire as a sales rep.

That's how you got a lot of your sales acumen. We've now, both of us have learned. And I think as you as well, we were learning to teach people that whether they're coming from a delivery role, which we've been talking about it. Ad nauseum, whether they're coming from a client and, but they have the right, they have the right stuff.

I think, they get up the personality. but I think we've got a really good methodology now around, maybe on the next podcast, we talk about it, but, the, the. our ability to take an outside platform owner and help them realize their story, express that, and then become consultative to other people.

Over time you just become like really good at it. Brian Del Cid is a great, example of that. And he went on to take on the NextGen practice at CDI, which is our Managed Service around ServiceNow, consumption based delivery model. 

That's partially because we built that culture on the team, right?

It's a very collaborative mentality, right? We're not incentivized to, compete against each other. I guess from a financial perspective, we're incentivized to work together, sell the same stuff, sell the same outcome. That helps from an enablement perspective, right? We've almost created this farm system.

We're able to take really anyone at the company, you take a look at Teenie, where she was coming in right out of college as a Business Development Representative, which is essentially a Junior Sales Rep, right? And she determined, hey, she was very, good, right? She was one of the, the best presenters.

She's really organized. good student, I would say. 

And, she determined that, hey, maybe sales isn't for me, but I wanted to be at CDI. She wanted to remain here. So what did we do? We took her over and put her in, an associate role on a light, a Microsoft licensing solutions architect.

She had no idea what. I asked her what kind of computer she had. I said, do you have a Mac or a Windows 11? She said, I don't even know. I'm like, all right, we got some work to do. 

if that doesn't, if that doesn't prove that we can train anybody. 

Exactly. Exactly. 

No, but she's, I think, again, like we joke around, but what you said is, the point.

And the point is she had the right stuff, right? She had the drive and I think organization, you guys both know, I admit this all the time. I don't even know, you know how I've gotten this far because I'm not that organized like compared to some of you heard here compared to some other people right like in my mind things are organized And I think, I have a lot of data that I, play with, but I'm not good at taking, I've never been a note taker in meetings.

Like I've never been like a big note taker. I only write things down that are like, I can't forget this thing. but generally speaking, I don't, I listened intently. I don't sit there writing the entire time. which, you know. At times, 

which is bad.

 It's not good now, but I've surrounded myself with really great organizational leaders and, no, it's good.

I think, but she's an extreme example, right? Like she's really organized and that's what is getting her where she wants to go faster. 

And for me, one of the things that, that drew me to presales in general was, the company that I worked at in the beginning, I had a very siloed use case of business, right?

It was healthcare. It was the way that company did it. And I wanted to supercharge that. And I wanted to get into a, a partner model where I was doing implementations for multiple customers, touching all kinds of industries. But even in delivery, you're only touching the projects that you win, right?

And so there's a larger subset, but it's still smaller than what we get to touch in pre sales, right? 

It's a very, usually an iterative task. You're going in and doing a specific set of tasks. Right now, you're actually consultative. You're talking to people, understanding their problems and their requirements, and they're actually putting something together.

So it's cool, for sure. 

Yeah, you have to, look at it that way because I think As SAs, it's easy to take for granted that we get so much exposure, right? And it's funny, we were, actually out last night. We had a, an event yesterday in the office with, our delivery teams.

And afterwards we went out for dinner and we were talking, we got talking to some people at the bar and they were asking us about our Salesforce practice and, One of the first questions they asked me was like, what, how are you verticalized? And I was like, we're not. And here's why.

And a big part of the conversation was exactly what we're talking about right here. The collective experience, the collective, taking all the experience from seeing it all. What you start to realize is everybody thinks they're like a unicorn or a snowflake, but there's so much overlap and commonality in, especially in, we're talking about platform software delivery.

Wow. You brought it all back after. 16 minutes. 

That's pretty good, right? 

Full circle impact. Not being specialists. 

This is how we're generally supposed to run a podcast. I know you've been on the other ones where it's just 

Mike, take note. 

Yeah, he's going to be watching 

this intently, 

sweating, 

what we're talking about here, I think is, the, why we do the podcast, right?

It's we're trying to come up with explaining to the world, people that want to become SAs, people that are already SAs, people that maybe are just like, Hey, this podcast looks like it's might be interesting. It's about tech and there's a lot of boring podcasts out there where they talk about. The actual products or, things like that. Like we would have just been podcast 1 million in that group. And we wanted to do something different, which is more philosophical, more leadership kind of conversations. And I think that's what we accomplish every single time.

 How much was this thing? 

How much was it?

How much was this thing? 

I don't remember. I bought 

What did you search to find an elf that you could put a face on? 

I just, 

wait till you see the one I got... 

Is it a dog toy? 

It I don't think it's a dog toy. 

What is it? 

It's like a it's you're supposed to sleep with it 

Oh nice. 

You have a nice tail.

Oh it's for a baby? 

Give it to your baby. John James can he can sleep with it. 

Sleep with daddy? 

Yeah. 

What is this a jester? 

I'm gonna I'll tell you how I found it. I got Instagram targeted. Oh. we all sit on the couch at night and scroll and scroll and I keep getting hit with this stupid, this guy holding himself like, and I was just like, hey, just reminded me of you.

Of course. Of course. I figured. So I, 

That's fantastic. 

I clicked, and once you click, then you're dead. It's over. Every ten minutes, you're getting the silly candy cane. 

Imagine me and the guy putting this in Photoshop. He's this is absurd. 

And that was like the best picture that I had of you facing forward.

Every other picture I have of you, you're making some like weird face.

 I love it.

 I'm too close to you in the picture. 

I think I would have put it in my bed. 

You should, Allie's going to love it. Let's 

she is going to love it. 

She's going to love it. And

 I expect one in the mail.

Yeah. There's a white wall over there. We'll take like prison photos of you before, before we leave. And, I'll get you one day. They have a lot of choices. it's not just. 

I thought it was like a Christmas special. 

Oh, you could become a potato. There's all kinds of 

Oh, you gotta be a potato, bro. 

They might even have a Yellowstone one.

They might. 

You could put a little cowboy hat on him. That would work. 

Tiny little cowboy hat. alright. I know you're not partaking in the beer. It's pretty early. I don't know why we are, but we are. I guess it's SAs and IPAs. So what do you think about this Iron Hill Brewery? I think this is, they're from Exton, PA.

Yep.

 What do we got? It's their Philly favorite IPA. 

They're playing the Philly favorite, PHAVs, they're playing off the Phanatic thing, right? Spencer. I'm not a Philly guy. 

Oh no. I'm not a Philly guy either. 

I hate Philadelphia. 

I wouldn't go as far as to say 

I hate Philadelphia sports. 

The Eagles. 

It's Dees.

 Dees. Sorry. 

I'm gonna give it a 5 out of 10, that's not really good. I probably would not go back and get a second. 

Wow. 

What do you give it? 

I mean it's rough when you're drinking a 6. 7, like to me a 6. 7 IPA is like my first drink of the day, is probably not what I would normally choose. 

I like the can. 

The can?

The can is cool. 

It's got a a pretty cool, the eagle kind of looks like, you're not gonna be able to see that, but there's a liberty bell and an eagle. 

We didn't say what it was, did we? Philly favorite IPA, the Iron Hill Brewery. Did we say that? 

Yeah, I did. And it's 6. 7. alcohol. I'm, I don't know, as I age, 

I'm a 5. 5 

ABV tolerances coming down. Whereas I used to seek out the 8 percent double IPAs and all the mouthfeel. Now I'm like, ah, can I just have a Miller light? so maybe we'll change the, name of the podcast to like SAs and. light beer, Heiniken

 lights, 

SAs and lights. so you said five out of 10, I'm going to go with 

5. 5. 

I, think this is a very generic beer. That's what I'm going to say. Yeah, it's very generic. It's a little malty. it's definitely got some bitterness to it. I'm going to go a little higher than five, just. Out of generosity to Iron Hill and give him a six. 

Nice. 

Make a six out of ten. I don't do the points.

I'm a whole number guy on ratings. We got ten to choose from. I can't imagine what a one would taste like. probably have to be mead or something like that. 

That would be a sour. 

Yeah. Oh, I don't know. 

I hate sours. 

We had sours on one of the shows and he was like, 

It's like this is a zero. Get this hat off my face.

Yeah, I don't know. I enjoy the sours.

 I think the can gets a seven. 

The can bumped it up for me. Definitely. Can is cool, but I saw this in, in, in the, 

what do we got? What do we got for the next one? 

I'm with Kyle, like I, I'm, I would see Philly and that would detract me immediately, but otherwise I'm, I'm Ellen to the.

Rocky boxing gloves. they're never going to let that movie go. All right. 

Kyle, the taller Kyle. Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. 

Absolutely.

 A lot of fun. We're going to get out there sooner than later. I got to go freshen up with my velvet jacket on and get ready for tonight.

You better have gifts for the 

Are you in the best dress contest again? 

What? 

Are you in the best dress contest again? 

I heard you're singing tonight. 

I'm singing? 

That's what I heard. 

I would sing. 

We're doing a contest. I think it was, it for children? what was it for children? Do something for children?

I thought we, I saw an email like there's gonna be some singing contest. I, when I heard that I could have swore that you would have signed immediately. 

I know Steve Pic is singing.

 Is he really? 

Yes. I think Mr. Falcone will be playing the guitar and I've heard that maybe his daughter might make a surprise appearance and sing

I don't know. 

That's gonna be interesting. 

I think it's gonna be fun. It's good the room starting to look it's crazy. It's like the biggest wedding you've ever seen that one fight.

 It looks nice Yeah. 

All right, Kyle. Thank you. 

Thank you

 Kyle. Thank you. We'll have to do this again soon next time. We see you.

We got the mobile rig now, so it's ready to rip 

Thank you for listening to SAs and IPAs, a production of CDI Studios. SAs is produced by Spencer Grogan and Alyssa Hall. Please like and subscribe to CDI's YouTube channel to stay up to date on the latest CDI content, including videos on our practice areas.

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