Nathan McGregor: 0:03
And when you get those things combined AI and low-Earth orbit, satellite and 5G you could bring them all together, and that’s one of the really things that I see very cool in the technology landscape right now is combining those technologies but managing them properly. The security challenges there’s transparency, observability, all those things that come into play that we’re solving.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:23
Today I have the pleasure in having a chat to Nathan McGregor, who’s the Senior Vice President of APAC at Cradlepoint. So we’re going to be talking about all things mobility, 5G and everything interesting in that space. Nathan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Michael, Good to see you. Likewise. Likewise, To kick things off for those who are listening, do you mind just sharing a little bit about your technology career journey and what led you to your current role as SVP of APAC in Cradlepoint?
Nathan McGregor: 0:50
Early school leaver became an electrician is probably where it all started off. Did my full apprenticeship as an electrician and then decided university was a requirement, went back and studied as a Bachelor of Applied Science in Analytical Chemistry. I did not get paid $1 for that role. In the end didn’t work a day of my life in science. But I found my way into telecommunications through a very low-end part of technology. At the time it was about cable connectors, which is ironic now that we’ll be talking today about 5G but that I started my telecommunications journey with connecting up fixed cables. I did a couple of other technology gigs, like 10 years at Juniper Networks, worked some time in Cisco, hitachi and now here I am at Cradlepoint and Full Circle. It’s an Ericsson-owned company.
Michael van Rooyen: 1:29
There we go.
Nathan McGregor: 1:30
So 20 ideas later, and now in 5G instead of 3G.
Michael van Rooyen: 1:33
A lot like all things in technology life cycle, right. So you started at Ericsson, back at Ericsson, that’s right. You went from cable connectors to now wireless and look, I know that you spent, as you said, a bit of time in the networking space as an executive or leading, and certainly you come from that heritage, cisco, and then obviously I know you’re from the Meraki days, and which was kind of revolutionary on its own, and now everyone’s talking about connectivity, mobility. So for people who are listening may not have ever heard of Cradlepoint, do you mind just talking about Cradlepoint’s mission, what the company exists for, what problems they solve, etc.
Nathan McGregor: 2:05
Fundamentally, we believe that anything that can be wireless will be wireless, but really at this stage we’re seeing ourselves as we want businesses to be able to be free to grow and innovate without having to worry about the consideration of connectivity. It’ll just always be there, always on and always fast. So when you give businesses that opportunity to take technology and innovate with cloud and mobility applications, then really where does the innovation for business stop?
Michael van Rooyen: 2:30
Just referring to your comment about wireless. So what you’re really talking about is Cradlepoint’s mission is really around 5G connectivity, wan connectivity. I know you do obviously lots of other products, but that’s really the focus right? How do we bring hyper-connectivity to people?
Nathan McGregor: 2:42
Yeah, and we think about it through three lenses. Really. We consider these use cases, if you like, either iot mobility so consider vehicles and things on the move and then branch. So that branch would be, as the things are shifting towards more sassy based technologies and using all wireless only solutions for branch connectivity. That’s really the we’re at the early stages of that, but it’s gaining great momentum and we come back to the early stages of that, but it’s gaining great momentum.
Nathan McGregor: 3:06
We come back to the mobility and vehicle. That was really the domain of radio networks in the past, push-to-talk type radio networks. Now we have police vehicles that are effectively mini data centers on the move. We have that much compute involved and the connectivity required. Right back now to IoT. When we thought about the 2G, 3g evolution, credit Point’s been in operation in 2006. I mean, iot was pretty much the only thing you really did with it at that time, but that was back parking meters and digital signboards, and now it’s electric vehicle charging stations. It’s that level of enterprise connectivity, leveraging the 5G network for the capabilities for enterprise.
Michael van Rooyen: 3:42
And just a massive explosion. I know we’re touching on it a bit today, but just this hyper-connectivity and people just want more and more connectivity. Everything’s hyper-connected. You talk about branch. It could even be home, right?
Nathan McGregor: 3:55
Yeah, I mean use the word want. These days it’s a need, probably going to sound a little dodgy about it, but networking is cool again, right right, we talked about that in some cases before because we this proliferation of cloud and that definitely changed the way enterprises architected, built their networks and their services and you know that shifted as well. That went super public for a for a long while, or massively private if it was just in some of the government agencies. So now everything’s a hybrid, but it doesn’t matter where it’s located. That’s just a name. The application is connectivity in the cloud. We’re seeing massive investment again in networks.
Michael van Rooyen: 4:28
Yes.
Nathan McGregor: 4:28
Because networks are fundamental to running your business. Now, whereas before you could manage, if your network went down, you’d offload your payments. It doesn’t matter now if you’re the small tobacconist or if you’re a major retailer. If your network’s no longer connected, then you put that sandwich board out that says sorry, we’re closed, yeah, correct, and we don’t know when we’re coming back. That’s right. It’s just not acceptable. It can’t happen.
Michael van Rooyen: 4:50
And we’ve seen incidents of outages right where that has really impacted has made a lot of people think about their strategies around backup. But let’s just continue to fuel the growth and you touch, as a starting point, a cradle point. Its heritage comes from and I guess you’re seeing this as well. There’s a lot of talk about lots of sensor data. There’s more required for connectivity. Also, that sensor data is really going to be feeding AI longer term because it’s just adding to those data models. So connectivity is not going anywhere. No, it’s not.
Nathan McGregor: 5:16
I mean we’re adding to it, right, we’re augmenting, and this is really significant right now. We’re seeing slightly off track here at the moment, mike, but we’re seeing two arms races occur in the APAC market and, to some extent, globally, and these things are an augmentation of everything we’ve talked about. But you talk about low Earth orbit satellite. That’s one of the arms race we’re seeing. The second one is this sub-undersea cable.
Nathan McGregor: 5:39
Australia is the location for this undersea cable connectivity because of all that AI push that we’re seeing and all the requirements of data centres and reliable governments and reliable energy and the like. So we’re seeing a huge intake of that. And then we’re seeing low-Earth orbit satellite be here, a first mover because of the vast uncovered and will never be covered by wireless. And when you get those things combined AI and low-Earth orbit satellite and 5G you could bring them all together and that’s one of the really things that I see very cool in the technology landscape right now is combining those technologies but managing them properly. The security challenges there’s, transparency, observability, all those things that come into play, that we’re solving those problems for people.
Michael van Rooyen: 6:19
Yeah, it is fascinating the trajectory going through. As you said earlier, networking is cool, is cool and again, it was always cool for those have been doing for a long time but but it’s really changed. Talking about the networking landscape, then, how have you seen, over years and different, starting all the way back in the early days of two and three G all the way through through to today, what have you really seen in the evolving of the industry, particularly a pack region?
Nathan McGregor: 6:41
was there early on, actually, when these lands were getting rolled out I I guess that was early 2000s I was doing a lot of work in that space. I mean, technology can drive real economic growth and entrepreneurialism right. We saw that DSLAMs became ADSL, became a technology that was accessible. Deregulation of telecommunications had already occurred, so these small businesses were popping up and delivering a service need that was there. I think it was an amazing time in Australia’s technology curve.
Nathan McGregor: 7:08
Fast forward a little while and we end up becoming regulated again through a government entity with NBN and all that stuff gets squashed down. I mean, yes, you’ll see brand names now that are RSPs, but that infrastructure is very limited, which is vastly different change. And now we’re seeing, if you look at further afield into our region with Malaysia, you know DNB, which is the local government, building one 5G network because they want to A avoid duplication and, b, they want access to all of their constituents and citizens as fast as they’re possible. Again to 5G technology. Because no matter where you look for the data, it’ll tell you economic benefit comes to countries with 5G, the most advanced 5G. But now we’ve got this wild west of low earth orbit satellite and private companies building out these public networks. So there’s been some really significant shifts in the networking technology over the last couple of decades.
Michael van Rooyen: 7:54
Yeah, that’s a really good point right. How you seeing 5G really extend the business operations and what’s helping in?
Nathan McGregor: 7:59
that area Back to the swim lanes that we kind of talked about. So IoT, mobility and branch probably frame it up a little bit in that regard. Certainly, one of the biggest areas are us. As for us, as a really simple tactical one, it’s it’s using 5g as the failover service offering. No matter how big the company is, or or, in fact, how small, um, you can’t be offline and so many times they’ll take, I think, as much out of habit as anything else they’ll take a fixed line connection yes, their primary and then convert and then have a 5g failover network service connection and that will happen real time that we know outage. We have some very large national retailers who look at the dashboard cloud managed platform and and see that they’re 15 to 18 percent of network traffic can be on 5g at any point in time because the fixed network is actually not there. That is a big part of it, but it’s about helping people consume that technology.
Nathan McGregor: 8:50
Simply, there’s an anecdote that I use we think 5G is the only network service you really need to operate With the speeds that you can operate at, unless you’re talking about really significant uplink service requirements, which you’re dedicating fiber to that anyway. But if you’re talking about really significant uplink service requirements which you’re dedicating fiber to that anyway. But if you’re talking about a standard, you used to go fixed for enterprise connection almost always. I’ll show it to say, yes, always you could be doing that on a 5G network connection, one of the things that shifted. We did some reports recently on people’s perceptions of 5G as a business. We did a state of connectivity report here in Australia. I did the similar thing about 18 months ago and the reasons for not doing 5G back then were one of them was actually affordability. The perception that data caps would blow the operational budget were real and scary for people. Fast forward to now that’s actually gone. Any operator is offering out a business to have a blended cap across the whole business. You can move it between different branches, you don’t have individual caps per branch and the price point is down. So no longer that’s the problem. In fact it’s inverted now.
Nathan McGregor: 9:55
Yes, one of the reasons people don’t go with fixed is because it’s too expensive. Yes, and then you lack the ability to be there fast. We have a lot of use cases where customers say I’m trying to roll out a new SD-WAN service, I can’t get my fixed network connected for six weeks. This is holding up my whole project. My whole SD-WAN project now is on delay because I can’t get my fixed network connected. So they go ahead and put a 5G adapter into that SD-WAN they were already investing in anyway. Pick your vendor, plenty out there to do it and and they’re looking and go hang on a second why that’s been working now for six weeks.
Nathan McGregor: 10:27
Why why am I not doing educating them again? You go, well, you can, you absolutely can. But you know to a point that anything I was going to make is that most people’s experience and it’s lived experiences for people that the guide as to whether they think something is is suitable for the use is their iPhone or their Android phone, and I think that’s where the 5G coverage is good or bad based on that. You’re driving, you’re in a vehicle, you’re in a tunnel. The thing’s not made for good connectivity as much as you think. That would be the fundamental. The antennas build into the external metal case because they couldn’t put a second antenna on it. Obviously the screen takes up all the size because that’s the thing people buy. They buy a screen. They don’t buy the quality of the chipset and the modem that sits in behind it and power. These things have to cycle power. If they’re close to a base station, they’ll drop the power right down because the batteries are so terrible in them. If they get further away, they’re going to up the power.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:30
And so your battery drains fast, don’t have any of those problems in an enterprise 5g world. Yet that’s ceo, cto, ceo. That’s their experience. Yeah, and that’s what they’re judging that on. I can. I can see that as the uh, the live perception. Right, because, uh, everyone who’s used to using their phone and it drops out and it’s a really good analogy.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:37
A couple things you covered there was the perception of data caps. Was that always used to be a nightmare people with mobile connectivity or wireless connectivity, because of the cost, data caps and and that’s certainly a clever thing that they’ve done in that space. But yeah, absolutely the perception is oh well, I’m not gonna have a good service if I buy a 5g or 4g service etc. But we see there’s lots of use cases where that becomes actually the most reliable mechanism. Uh, it’s what you’re saying is really an education for people to cross that divide, say, you know, the world’s not gonna fall in, it’s actually going to probably be better speeds, better performance. You know, it’s built for low latency, all these things. And it’s funny that perception that we still need to fix cable in the ground.
Nathan McGregor: 12:12
Certainly, that’s available for a valid reason, but, but you can live your life basically on 5g I mean, ironically, the worst person to ask about whether 5g will do the the job for your enterprise is a mobile carrier.
Michael van Rooyen: 12:25
Right.
Nathan McGregor: 12:26
And it takes a little while to get your head around that. And the reason is simple. They have this view that networks they do radio studies and surveys all the time. They think they know where the network’s performing and they don’t want to provide a substandard service. And so they overly rotate those levers and dials so that, michael, if you want it there, 100% guaranteed it’ll work. Well, there’s the MPLS network stays. I mean that that’s not needed anymore. People want connectivity, yes, and so the reality is we’ve got plenty of customers who will go on by for 200 branches nationally. So you can’t have done a radio network survey for that, the way they think they were done, and they just go let’s go with that. We buy it sim cards in, send it out. Now a lot quite often do two sim cards, right, mm-hmm, in fact that they they so lean on the IT. Now they don’t have. One of our customers is a is a charitable retail. The only people at that branch volunteers right they’re not well known for technology capability.
Nathan McGregor: 13:19
So the device will go out but with two carrier sims in it and the device, once it turns on, it, will connect and go hang on which one’s best and that one’s best this time that’s my network. Now the other one will become the backup for that network, wow. So anyway, the point I was going to make is we don’t get problems with people coming back, going oh geez, we only had 80% of these things working or less. It’s not that you get a couple maybe, and it’s all those with an antenna system. So you just don’t get all the information and all the facts normally. So testing is the best way. Try it out.
Michael van Rooyen: 13:48
You’ll be surprised, I think what we’re saying. And I know we talked a bit about this earlier before the show, but security is obviously always a major concern for wireless, the perception of wireless being unsecure and, look, you’re really touching a good point. First of all, maybe you’ve got to just touch on inherently how the difference between people’s perception of wireless being your wireless at home, 802.11, traditional stuff that people relate to wireless and they’re seeing mobility as probably the same sort of wireless around, really securing that as well.
Nathan McGregor: 14:15
I rely on much smarter people in my business to be certain about how to answer those. But certainly Wi-Fi definitely. I mean anyone that’s working in large corporate and listening to this will know they’ll often have to go through retraining of if you’re in a public environment, don’t use public Wi-Fi, you can be hacked, and so on and so forth. True, all true, but that’s wireless. In the Wi-Fi context, the thing about wireless networks and it seems like it might be just as insecure to people because they can’t touch it, it’s magic, it’s in the air. Compared to I can physically look at the cables that are connected to the box over there is that 5G has got strong encryption built into it. There’s global standards around how they build mobile networks. There’s an organisation called 3GPP and they release versions to make sure that everything’s done. Network connectivity speeds a whole bunch of aspects to it, but security is one of them. So the modem itself and the integration of that modem to the SIM card and that SIM card and the information that flows to the network means you’ve got an encrypted service between your network and that device, and it is ridiculously hard. You just don’t see examples of that. Add things like low-Earth orbit satellite to these kind of service offerings and you’ve got to stop thinking about that a different way again. That is a public internet yes, I’m no expert in that area so I won’t try to comment too much further but it is not an encrypted service offering, so that needs to be something you think about. So now you’ve got a device which is connected on 5G and it might have a fixed network connection to. It could have any variation. Now you have to just think about the security of that device as an internet service offering for an enterprise, and that’s where you’ll start to fall into things like what sort of cyber offerings are you putting on that device? Not because of the encryption connection connection’s done. This is about the packets flowing in that connection.
Nathan McGregor: 15:56
Now this is a cyber security architecture discussion. How much do I put on the device? How much do I put on the on the application, on the client? How much do I put in the cloud? Those are questions that start to unpack things like sassy and where does that fit in? And do we, do we do we have a different way of looking at the architecture and cradle points? Been looking very much into that. They’re adding security, acquiring companies that do cybersecurity, adding that onto our management platform so that you can be deploying 5G networks, like as we said, remotely anywhere you want, but the application can be protected in some way. Things like remote browser isolation, for instance, is a service that sits on top of our SASE version so that you can just add security capability to your enterprise.
Michael van Rooyen: 16:33
And it’s a great definition there because, again, people inherently think it’s the same sort of service. But really, moving again on your point about fixed wired connections to wireless connections, you know inherently secure from beginning, right, so much harder to eavesdrop. You know it’s regulated globally, as you said, and then you’re ideally putting security servers on top of that, whether it be in the cradle point devices themselves part of the platform. So again, crossing that bridge of letting the cable go, so to speak, Can you touch on a bit about then, if I think about branch connectivity, if we talk about branch as an example, and IoT and that you know, can you tell me a little bit about the SD-WAN capabilities, because everyone thinks about okay, it’s great, A quick spin-up, as you talked about, everyone wants to secure and client to cloud today. Can you touch a little bit about the SD-WAN portfolio or how that works for you guys?
Nathan McGregor: 17:27
Firstly, I’ll say, out of the blocks, a lot of people will just use a CrotaPoint product in front of their existing SD-WAN architecture. It’s not uncommon and it should be considered as such because a lot of companies have already made a big investment in that space. It’s been a big move in the last seven or so years. Some are coming at the end of that life cycle. There’s reviews of vendors in that space of SD WAN, but it’s first and foremost best to know that really good 5G connectivity is best done by really good 5G companies and you get your best service of that. So sitting in front of an existing SD-WAN is quite probable, but we see more and more people going wireless all the way and once you do that then you need to start giving some SD-WAN functionality. I went on explain SD-WAN your listeners no doubt, but they’re not listening to you, michael, if they don’t know SD-WAN very well. But what we’ve done is there’s a couple of things to think about in when it comes to wireless and why we’ve approached it slightly differently. If you consider an existing SD-WAN service with an existing vendor which does fixed, you haven’t thought about the underlying highly chatty conversations that are occurring between your router and the network that happen all the time to make sure that the link is the right link. It’s using all these other intellect IP protocols to maintain that service offering and that link offering and making decisions about which link. You don’t necessarily want to do that in wireless because you want to preserve that data. You want to preserve for other caps reasons which are less relevant at the moment, but also latency problems. So if you’re thinking about it in that context, then you need that link to not waste any of that time talking about internet protocols. You want to talk about the traffic and the data that’s’s being sent.
Nathan McGregor: 18:49
So we’ve done some very specific things and I’ve done for many years now around how we manage those links and link connectivity and the intelligence that goes into that way in selection, and it’s very critical when you’re doing that on 5g, less critical when you’re doing it on a fixed network. So we’d already solved that problem. Then we just added all the security overlay to that. So ztna capability, web filtering function. We talked about rather remote browser isolation, these are things then. Then branches can go and roll out, solve things like phishing attacks. So you don’t to worry so much about the zero day, because if you’re particularly a medium enterprise. How do you keep up with all this cyber stuff?
Nathan McGregor: 19:23
yeah, it’s hard, how do you keep investing in it? You need companies who can manage that for you well, but at the right level of technology. Where you can be, you get good quality for what you’re paying for, but you’re not paying like you’re a top five consulting company in the way they spend on cyber. So that’s a really important part of adding that capability into our offering, which is that we can really help you spin up medium enterprise or large scale branch really quickly and add some very significant security functionality very cheaply and operate it very simply. Yeah, and I guess a point earlier around mobile fleet so you really want to show that and add some very significant security functionality very cheaply and operate it very simply.
Michael van Rooyen: 19:52
Yeah, and I guess a point earlier around mobile fleet. So you really want to make sure that security gets extended and that’s kind of the platform approach to delivering that.
Nathan McGregor: 20:02
And even we haven’t had a chance to touch on it. But from someone who’s experienced in networking SD-WAN type fixed networking but hasn’t had as much experience in enterprise wireless, there’s some daunting things for you as it relates to where is that device. I used to run over 100 branches for my company and I could almost describe to you every little rack that I’ve got in every tree in every branch.
Nathan McGregor: 20:23
You don’t have that as much anymore, particularly if you’ve gone so lean on your IT. You’ve just dispatched it by post and someone’s plugged it in near the point of sale, put it in a vehicle. Where is it? Yes, and how am I managing that? Like it’s sitting connected in a rack. That’s the really cool stuff to do Solving that problem where someone looks on a cloud management platform and it looks like all the other stuff they’ve done with SD-WAN, but now it’s also got those layers of cell tower strength between where that different carriers that are sitting. You know where all the cells are on a mapping system with a GPS location. For it you don’t need those really deep 5g skills which, by the way, is something that customers in our reports have told us. One of the things people are scared about is do I have the 5g skills to manage this stuff?
Michael van Rooyen: 21:06
well, this is not built that way yes, let you guys deliver that right and that’s what you’re saying and it’s a really good point. When you think about just connectivity, how do you even make sure that devices, when they’re decommissioned or used, you need that central visibility, which is key and people are just expecting that today. Right from that point of view, if we think about IoT or OT obviously a huge play. We touched a lot on security. Do you mind just talking a little bit about the private 5G space? So, people listening, you know private LTEs, kind of private network built for a particular purpose. What are you guys doing in that space, nathan? And helping customers with that journey?
Nathan McGregor: 21:39
I talked about networking evolutions a little bit before but we haven’t really touched on sort of those architecture use case evolutions and private 5G is definitely one of those. It’s helped describe it a little bit. So to run a 5G network as a carrier in any country you need to have government provided spectrum and you would have heard about spectrum auctions and how much ACMA is our local one and how much the government used to expect for that problem and what people are expected to pay now based on return on investment. But it’s also now this industrial spectrum ability. So it used to be just for carriers to build public facing networks but there was always going to be a point in time when they would provide spectrum specifically for an enterprise to buy or rent. Typically Australia hasn’t been on the forefront of that yet in terms of timing. We are now there. So in 2024, the government offers industry-based spectrum. So if you’re a miner, it used to be easier for mining anyway, because they’re so remote they don’t have any. You know we’re kind of managing spectrum conflict here, right, so they didn’t have that out in the far reaches of Western Australia. But if you have a manufacturing site in Western Sydney and you want to automate that thing. You want to put AGVs, so automatic guided vehicles, robots, in the way that everything’s run through from a safe and fast way using robots, or even just the logistics. So Ericsson does this stuff. I should sort of start by saying, and it’s quite a point, we play a big part in that, a role in that for Ericsson. Yes, and we had one in Korea where it was a logistics company and everything they did in there had AGVs, but it was also the handheld scanners. You can imagine someone walking around the, the picking and picking pallet locations and things like that.
Nathan McGregor: 23:12
Well, wi-fi has just run its course now in many of these applications. If you want scale, if you want accuracy, so for things like robots and agvs, you want low latency, then actually wi-fi is finished. So private 5g is the way that the investments are now occurring. So get some spectrum from the government that doesn’t have a conflict with local telecommunications operators. Deploy your own mini base station, so radio nodes and a network controller, and you’ve effectively got your own mini 5G network. Your devices connect up to that and you manage that, or have that managed by someone as you’re offering it, and there’s huge amounts of productivity and safety gains. I might add. There’s some recent reports. I saw that the return on investments can be within months on people making these investments for the right reasons.
Michael van Rooyen: 23:55
Yeah, very targeted. You’re right. Mining’s been doing it for a little while. It’s exciting. I know the US and Europe had adopted this spectrum thing for a while where you could actually build these networks, and it’s still contained so you can’t really overlap as you’re going to buy an area. But it really overlap, it’s gonna buy an area, but it’s great and I think for the industry it’s a good market opportunity as well. Right? So for managed services, people are able to spend, spend up new, certain new services and support those customers. 802 11 wireless is very good, but but at the end of the day, when you start talking about low latency, automated vehicles etc.
Nathan McGregor: 24:22
You know you need that next level of assurance and security and everything that goes with it yeah, I mean, wi-fi is okay for things like when in store, managing shelf shelving, price points and things like that, things that aren’t on the move in that way. But if your wi-fi was never made for things like handover?
Nathan McGregor: 24:38
right it was never intended to have the handovers that you, so we’re taking all that technology that’s. That means that you can drive your car at 110 kilometers an hour and hand over to the next cell side. If you’re lucky enough in a regional deployment to put that now, shrink it down into into a factory type deployment and be able to completely transform and digitize the way you go about building your business operations internally because of technology.
Michael van Rooyen: 25:00
Absolutely correct, yeah it’s very, very exciting. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about ot being digitally transformed, but they’re really catching on to onto the bandwagon. Now we’ve talked a lot about about the wireless versus wide connectivity. I know that Cradlepoint’s obviously a champion of wireless WANs For Enterprise Network IoT, all those use cases you’re talking about. What are the most significant challenges businesses face in this transition and how to have people navigate?
Nathan McGregor: 25:23
that it is definitely believing that it can be done, believing that the coverage is there and the capability is there to do it. I still go and spend time, you know, when I get the chance to spend time with customers or prospects, and talking about a conference is what I can still get people really, you know, really it’s like, yes, it’s absolutely there. So there’s the fundamentals of businesses and even just at senior levels of networking that just aren’t quite there yet. And then when they do get there, so let’s get one of our team to come in and show you how it works and they get sold on it straight away. Oh my god, how much, how? What would it be like if I could spin up a network in a day? What would be like if I could roll this thing out just by sending out postbox, like it changes their thinking. But then up the line, they’ve got to convince people that this stuff works and go. Are you sure you’re going to be doing 5g and the whole network? You know there’s a whole lot of that still goes around on the enterprise side. But then it comes down to how will I manage that Like? It seems like it’s a different way to do it. They think that they can go to their normal managed service operator or an RSP and it’s a fixed network and then they’re okay and that’s like I’m holding them accountable for it. Well, our channel partners and our managed service providers do exactly that for 5G Manage your SIM cards for you and the whole bundling of that, so that’s no longer a barrier to entry. So the final thing becomes down to really the feeling about skills and whether they have the skills for 5G. Now we talked about private networking a moment ago. Again, you can go outsource that whole thing if you want to, but yes, if you wanted to keep some capability, that is a 5G network you’re operating.
Nathan McGregor: 26:48
Come back to where we’re talking about with an enterprise and a network just having a device. It’s just another network connection. It’s just another device. It’s a router. In some cases you add security. It’s now an SD-WAN type router. It’s nothing different in that regard and if it were, we’ve made sure that’s so simple that we’ve provided it all online certifications for people At Crater Point University. You can go online, sign up and then you can start getting through your certifications and development. So in actual fact, it’s been an up-up for people because you’ve got these people with networking skills and managers can now provide to the networking team. Well, come on, we’ll get you certified on 5G. It’s kind of simple, but it’s definitely a technology shift for people and they can start thinking about adding 5G to their sort of development repertoire you touched on channel partners.
Michael van Rooyen: 27:35
I know that even pre-Cradle Point, you’ve been working a long time closely with channel partners From your thought leadership point of view. How do you strategically collaborate with those and enhance the adoption of these innovative technologies At the very base level things like.
Nathan McGregor: 27:46
We never do anything without a partner, so everything we do is deployed, sold, provided for through channel, but that can come in a couple of flavors like just be standard resale or it can be a complete managed service like I spoke about.
Nathan McGregor: 27:58
So we always see ourselves as a collaborator with partners in that regard.
Nathan McGregor: 28:01
But when you take 5G and you’re adding it into part of an end-to-end solution offering, in some way solving a bigger, broader problem For instance, if you’re adding in starlink and satellite services to the offering with 5g then how do you, in collaborating on solving some of those challenges around things like bonding the links together, for instance, or filing over between those links and doing it with?
Nathan McGregor: 28:22
You know, in a policing agency, for instance, body worn cameras and in vehicle cameras how do we solve that problem so that we’re dealing with data through port for potentially real-time streaming and maybe even alerting of incidents, using the router as a part of that whole ecosystem of the collaboration that we see this as our technical alliances all the time right and then we offer those out to to our customer base for an emergency? One of the technology shifts has been meshing across multiple vehicles and having a meshing technology that syncs with the router for data transfer and again you’re solving the whole problem with your partners and as I said, from a thought leadership point of view, how are you internally, externally, you know really fostering a culture of innovation, agility?
Nathan McGregor: 29:04
you know, within the organization that you look after, Well, our product team, obviously in the US and around the world, typically factor into the overall innovation of what we do. But we lead with an idea that we innovate on 5G, so we’re constantly sharing that information across the whole organization and taking those ideas and thoughts out to our local customer base. We started to see here in Australia before our US team, we started to see the use of LeoSat, so a low-earth orbit satellite was earlier than what we’d seen in the US. One of our esteemed engineers here locally had come to me with an idea on that’s now widely public. University of New South Wales was doing the solar challenge from Darwin down to Alice Springs and said they’d like to get connectivity using satellite from the solar car but hooking up all of their support vehicles. They want to be always on connected because it’s not just the telemetry in that vehicle, it’s catering, it’s the campsite crews, everybody needs to have data on the go.
Nathan McGregor: 29:56
And I was like I get it, yeah, we can probably solve a part of that, but how are you going to make sure that we’ve got link connectivity across all of those cars? And John said give me a minute, I’ll see if I can come up with an idea on that. So he went away and just noodled on it, lived a bit of research, talked with the Sunswift team, came up with a different one, came back to him and said so I think I can do it this way. Are you okay with me going and doing it? And I was like okay, all right, tried and tested, put some guardrails around it and then go and solve that problem. And they did. And, like I said, it wasn’t a playbook at the time when we first started on this thing, but allowing that innovation, the capability for people to come up, bring an idea, test it a little bit, right, but not make the barriers so hard. If you always hold people just to those rules, you just don’t quite drive the same level of innovation and new ideas.
Michael van Rooyen: 30:44
That’s a really good example, and you know you don’t want to stifle innovation, right? How do you stay ahead of the industry? I mean, the industry moves so fast, right, and it’s what sort of thought leadership process, reading like what’s your go-to?
Nathan McGregor: 30:52
My thoughts on it typically would be if you’re going to stay in technology industry, in leadership I mean, you’re always going to have surround yourself with smart engineers, obviously smart people who have curiosity, intelligence and also just a passion to solve problems for people and really feel just as motivated by that as the, as the outcome of the paycheck at the end, from an individual standpoint, from manager, to be able to engage with those people at the right level. I kind of think of it as you need to stay, you know, a centimeter deep across hundreds of different technologies, whether they’re specific to your industry or your customers industries. You’ve got to know a little bit across the board because that gives you your own ability to stress, test, ideas, thoughts and take the curiosity for it. But then you’ve got to also be super deep on a couple of things that are really impactful or you think we’re about to be really impactful in your business. And if you can do those things in, you know, stay, stay broad for a centimeter and stay really deep on a couple of things, yes, you, you can do those things in.
Nathan McGregor: 31:43
You know, stay, stay broad for a centimeter and stay really deep on a couple of things. Yes, you, you can come up with better ideas, but you can also be more credible, and that’s important. You’ve got to have credibility as managers in technology, because if you don’t seem to have any idea other than how the logo works on the place and how to give a big pitch on a platform, then you just don’t get the exposure that fast. Innovation, if you like. It’s just as much on the commercial scene as it is on technology right, because the technology shift can still take time, even with a good idea, but your commercial lens can move very quickly so you can try different things for people to give them that sort of early entry point, get started on stuff and if that continues to work for people, then drive it harder.
Nathan McGregor: 32:16
I think that’s somewhere we can really make some fast changes as a manager.
Michael van Rooyen: 32:19
What trends do you believe are going to shape the?
Nathan McGregor: 32:21
industry over the next decade. I think the obvious one will be AI. Yes, the less obvious part of that is how AI for us, the way we’re thinking about it from a 5G perspective, because everybody either will have or must have an opinion on how AI affects their business. We did do the study that I mentioned, the same study that stated connectivity report a few months ago for Australian businesses report and a few months ago for Australian businesses and one thing they all said was if their business has an AI strategy and 40% of those businesses said that connectivity is critical element to that. And again, this comes down to people’s experiences versus the true people who are making decisions on how it gets implemented. Everyone’s experiences is chat, gpt on the phone and stuff they see in social media. It’s kind of fun, but when it comes down to then, what will those real world use cases be? There is a reason NVIDIA’s stock price has gone absolutely nuts, right.
Michael van Rooyen: 33:08
The chipset.
Nathan McGregor: 33:09
Proliferation of this doesn’t sit just in the data center, it’s sitting out on the edge. So they’re taking this. The expansion opportunity for businesses like that is incredible because now it completely explodes, based on getting out of the data center and further out into the edge. We take incredible because now it completely explodes, based on getting out of the data center and further out into the edge. We take out further out in the edge and that’s where that connectivity question comes back from the customers. How do I get that connectivity?
Nathan McGregor: 33:30
And the things you’re doing in ai aren’t necessarily going to be sitting in like we’re talking about branch and the like. It’s going to be sitting up a street pole somewhere or within a factory somewhere making these real-time, very fast computer vision type decisions based on what it sees and then interpreting that and making a decision on it. So compute edge is going to be super critical and we can’t be throwing large payloads of data all the way to the edge for everything that we want to use AI for. So we’re going to have to get smarter at doing things like compression things to make sure we get smaller payloads, but the decision is still going to be out there or that connectivity layer is going to need to be out there. So I think we’re going to see a massive shift in the way connectivity is used.
Michael van Rooyen: 34:05
We’ve all been talking about spin-in, spin-out for a long time, right, so local compute branches, data centers, then we push it all into the cloud and then we talk about hybrid cloud. But with this evolution of, as you’re saying, the amount of processing and AI that’s going to be needed at, you know, really pushes back that computing to the edge is right, and I think I don’t know how well prepared people are, but it’s something of consideration and there’s many use cases I’ve never even thought about right.
Nathan McGregor: 34:29
I think you’re right. I don’t know that the preparation has been done yet. It’s moving really, really quickly. Will we solve, if we need to solve, the security challenges that that might also bring up? And it’s just getting scratched on whiteboards now, so happening in real time.
Michael van Rooyen: 34:40
It’s a really interesting time to be in industry Off the back of that just distributed computing. You know lots of. We talk a lot about power consumption. No doubt PowerPoint must have a real thought around and yourself particularly around sustainability right Globally?
Nathan McGregor: 34:57
how are you approaching the sustainability? Those are big challenges around AI, power consumption and use, and let’s hope it’s getting used for productivity gains and social gains rather than the other aspects to it. It’s interesting to watch this as an aside. Around power, the 3G network, compared to the 5G network, is many multiples time more power hungry. Technology angles need to be considered and not just assumed that if you’re going faster, therefore you’re more power. It’s a massive difference between three. The faster we can get off 3G to 5G, the better it will be environmentally in terms of the use case.
Michael van Rooyen: 35:26
On mobility and wireless, Wow, look, it’s probably something people didn’t realise, right? I guess the perception is always because it’s faster and it performs faster and might be back to the CPU. We used to get faster processors at home. You know, get hotter, they need more power. So people probably have that perception. But it’s a very good point that you’re building the efficiencies that are gaining.
Nathan McGregor: 35:42
But there are other things the simple stuff in terms of the way we package things so they’re not overly glossed up and painted and all this other plastics and stuff put over the top of them. Just keep it really simple. And the cardboard aspect to it. It’s again a small thing. But you look at the production of SIM cards globally. We’re trying to get those SIMs out by going eSIM. That’s kind of roped out in terms sim capability in technology. But then you know we can’t come back to be even private 5g.
Nathan McGregor: 36:03
So a rough thing you could do in a warehouse or a large scale open environment you might have something like 100 wi-fi access points. So think of the cabling to those hundreds of versions of these metals and things that have gone into making those when they’re about a similar size. That’s some advancements in technology as well as they have an environmental impact and sustainability. But one of the last things we we sort of mentioned around so that’s all the tactical stuff put on the report there’s plenty of businesses saying that one of the things that are holding back some sustainability projects of theirs is connectivity, because some of that sustainability is about understanding with sensor data out to temperatures and water gauges and all those other things aspects to it. If they don’t have the connectivity to get that data back, then they’re not able to finish off those sustainability projects. To give that end to end, close the loop on them some really good points there.
Michael van Rooyen: 36:48
I mean not only in your access point scenario there, you know. Think of just about the disposal of that later on, right? I mean that that’s just a huge challenge for industry, as it is right, we’ve got so much e-waste as we come near into the discussion today. What advice would you give aspiring tech leaders looking to make a positive impact on the industry?
Nathan McGregor: 37:05
Definitely go back to that aspect around keeping across all the technology shifts, you know, staying educated, staying alert to what’s going on, even if you don’t think it has a direct impact here or now. You know kind of think through all the scenarios. Another aspect is just to ensure that you know quite often I restarted this discussion today, michael, about how I got here and whilst it wasn’t a typical path, it wasn’t a typical either. You know many people our industry have not made it through.
Nathan McGregor: 37:28
I’m going to go to university, become computer science, and then I’m here so it’s just as important to kind of look at that from a gaps perspective on. Okay, we got here and somehow I found myself being successful at it. It’s been great. But to be really successful at it, what do I need? What didn’t I get done early on in our commercials, because I’ve worked on pricing, bids and proposals, large-scale project bids and financials that’s different to company financials that are important to your customers and the buying decisions that they make. One thing for me is just making sure you’ve taken stock of a rounded approach to how it takes to run a business. Just because you’ve been successful to this day without that education doesn’t mean you don’t need it. So for me, that was filling in those gaps. So I filled in that gap with the financial analysis of companies. I picked up a couple of MBA subjects and solved that problem. So I felt comfortable around profit loss and how businesses operate. So those things. Just tick a couple of those things off as you go.
Michael van Rooyen: 38:18
Yeah, rob, try and absorb as much as you can. I mean, can I mean? We’ve got so much information, fingertips and learning, right, but but being saying oppressed, as you say, of technology, but also learning some other soft skills that they can really supplement it, right? It’s not, no, it’s not tech for tech sake. It’s about running a business into them and looking and looking after your people right uh, you know, probably an interesting topic is a lot of diversity and inclusion.
Michael van Rooyen: 38:37
Discussion in the tech industry is is historically, you know, fairly male dominated, and it’s just the way the tech industry started and it’s changing quite a bit, which is great. What are your thoughts on that? How are you dealing with that?
Nathan McGregor: 38:49
I love the question because I like to make sure we’re all constantly considering and solving, helping solve these, but to me it’s also it’s always been a conflict in terms of my lived experience doesn’t suggest I’ve got a great understanding of the problem statement for people who live it all the time, but but I say that very openly to people in any business that I’ve worked for as well in that you know, we aren’t the voices we. All we can do is provide the opportunity to people.
Nathan McGregor: 39:12
Any large company these days has definitely got the, the standard offerings internally. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, but things like, you know, committees around particular minorities and the like, so that we’ve got, you know, the be heard, the opportunity to have like groups that provide people the opportunity to talk and speak and be heard. So there’s those things that any company does. But really I think where rubber hits the road is how you run local communications and meetings on any given day, and they’re everyday things, they’re not the once a week meetings. So two things that I definitely consider there. One is, as a leader in business, it’s quite easy to fall back to your same idea generators. You know we’ve all had it before that. Oh gee, I’m noodling on this problem. Hey, michael, can you jump in a room here with me? We’ll see if we can not. This, let’s go. Let’s go, tony.
Nathan McGregor: 39:55
You know, often our technology right. There’s a three bike sitting in the room on the whiteboard trying to solve a problem. We constantly fall back to that. Now, expanding that thought process to people who may not necessarily be directly evolved or experienced in that area is quite often a good thing to do. So I’ll do that and I don’t waste people’s time but thinking, hey, listen, I’m trying to solve this problem. Would you might come to a meeting tomorrow and to see if you can provide?
Nathan McGregor: 40:17
some insights into it so that I always find is good and again, to choose a different person each time, just provide some opportunity. The other one would be, when you do have wider meetings with people, is to make sure the quietest person is speaking. I like that and and often you’ll find that is the person who fits in that category that you mentioned before. I do like that.
Michael van Rooyen: 40:34
Follow that rule yeah, I’m always remember that ad. You know why don’t we just make a flat bottom taco right? Because you get someone totally different who may not be as close to it, because sometimes you don’t see it right, but I do like that though. That’s a really, really good one, nathan, about you know, choosing someone who might have been that particular focus, but but get them to have a third party view on it or just something different. That’s probably where the best ideas come from.
Nathan McGregor: 40:54
You don’t get any of those things without making sure the team has a respectful environment, though, right of course. So that’s absolutely table stakes. Have to make sure, and then that gets caught out really quickly if anyone deviates from that.
Michael van Rooyen: 41:05
That’s a very, very good point. So, reflecting on your career, what have been some of the most rewarding experiences that you’ve been involved with and what motivates you to continue driving this innovation in the tech industry? What makes you excited?
Nathan McGregor: 41:17
I’ve been really fortunate to be a part of this crazy ride. I was there when I was using 3g video calls because we were building pre-production networks back in 2000. I remember holding his NEC clamshell at the time ago and getting a video calling God, jesus, awkward, who do that? And yeah, and then here we are. I enjoy seeing things bubble up to a technology point that might could go either way now. Well, where we’re going to be next? Usually I like that. I’m a bit scared about AI, to be be honest, but that’s kind of the next one that hits that major shift and transformation of technology from here.
Michael van Rooyen: 41:48
Which probably leads me on to my last question, which I ask all guests on the show is tell me about the most significant technology change or shift that you’ve seen or been involved with during your career.
Nathan McGregor: 41:58
Oh, wow, oh. It’s going to sound really simple when I say it. It was a really significant shift of technology in business when BlackBerry shifted to smartphones. I mean it was really profound and it had many implications that have flown on. I don’t think we tie that back the credit to a lot of the stuff that’s happened since, back to that kind of event.
Nathan McGregor: 42:18
Yes, think about what happened then. We didn’t care about the security on that device, we just assumed everything was locked up and barreled up as secure. In fact, if that phone broke, you just grabbed another one out of the drawer and plugged a sync data and you were back up and running with all your full, secure, secure email. So that was never considered. There was personal security, was anything? Can I see my laptop? Can I see my blackberry? Yep, then everyone’s secure, like we’re safe. Then you shift to the smartphones and what has occurred in that space around businesses putting on applications and what that application means to, to to the whole workflow and customer engagement. But then it added, yes, a lot of challenges. I mean, email wasn’t even secure at that point, right, so everything had to be secured in a different way. So it changed the whole architecture but then, conversely, security got a whole lot better. I mean, how many people listening here remember carrying the the rSA token around on their phone on their key for the phone with the keys.
Nathan McGregor: 43:09
And now, not only have we replaced that with the phone, we’ve now it’s enabled things like two-factor authentication anywhere you go, anytime. So you know, I think that was a really significant shift, as simple as it may be.
Michael van Rooyen: 43:21
It’s actually a very, very interesting point and one that ties back. Saw the iPhone release and that was it. But you’re right, it’s really the precursor to that right. I remember getting my first BlackBerry and of course they used to call it the Crackberry because you couldn’t get off it, right, you were on the phone or looking at your email. Wow, I’ve got my email on my phone, I need to plug in or connect, or to that moment, and I agree that that’s definitely one that’s changed the landscape. Some would say for good, some would say for bad, but but that’s a change the landscape. Nathan really appreciate that. The time today and interesting conversation that’s terrific.
Nathan McGregor: 43:54
Thanks, Michael.
