Tech Talks with Taylor

Leanne Taylor

Welcome to Taylor Made Sales' Tech Talks with Taylor podcast where innovation meets opportunity! Hosted by Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, this series is dedicated to keeping Australian businesses informed about the latest advancements in technology and how they can empower their business. Whether it's discovering cutting-edge solutions, navigating the tech landscape, or finding ways to enhance productivity, Tech Talks with Taylor is your go-to resource for actionable insights and expert advice. Tune in and let's explore the tech that drives success!

  1. E20: Smart Printing putting money back in your budget

    18 Apr ·  Video

    E20: Smart Printing putting money back in your budget

    Are your print contracts quietly draining your budget? You're not alone — and this episode is a must-listen for Australian organisations looking to take back control of their printer contracts. In this week's Taylor Made Sales Podcast, we're joined by Alyve Technology, a Melbourne-based technology advisory and solutions partner helping organisations simplify print, optimise contracts, and reinvest hard-won savings back into their business.   Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success.   For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or www.taylormadesales.com.au

    17 min
  2. E19: How leading enterprises are de‑risking Sitecore upgrades

    19 Mar ·  Video

    E19: How leading enterprises are de‑risking Sitecore upgrades

    If you're running Sitecore, chances are an upgrade is on your roadmap — and also on your worry list. For many enterprise teams, Sitecore upgrades become long, risky, and expensive projects. Internal teams are stretched, agencies are focused on experience delivery (not platform ops), and technical debt keeps piling up. The result? Upgrades get delayed… sometimes for years. That's exactly why we recorded this podcast with Dataweavers.   Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or www.taylormadesales.com.au

    25 min
  3. E18: Redefining the Patient Experience in Healthcare with Ring Central

    17 Mar ·  Video

    E18: Redefining the Patient Experience in Healthcare with Ring Central

    Healthcare is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades, driven by digital expectations, rising patient demand, and the need for secure, compliant communication across every touchpoint. Yet for many healthcare organisations, patient engagement is still fragmented, manual, and frustrating — for both staff and patients. In this episode of the Taylor Made Sales Podcast, we're joined by RingCentral, a global leader in cloud communications, to unpack how healthcare organisations are re‑engineering the way patients experience the healthcare system — from first contact to follow‑up care.   Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or www.taylormadesales.com.au

    23 min

  4. 08/12/2025

    E17: Mastering Cloud Optimisation with Azure

    In this episode, we explore how organisations can take control of their cloud spend without compromising performance or innovation. Featuring David Dempsey from Macquarie Cloud Services, the discussion focuses on: The challenge: Why cloud costs spiral out of control and the hidden risks of "set and forget" deployments. Proven strategies: Rightsizing workloads and eliminating idle resources. Leveraging Azure-native tools like Cost Management + Billing and Advisor for actionable insights. Implementing governance frameworks to prevent overspend and ensure compliance. Real-world examples: How businesses have achieved up to 30% savings through proactive optimisation. Future-proofing your cloud: Preparing for AI-driven workloads and scaling efficiently without budget blowouts. Whether you're a CIO, IT leader, or finance stakeholder, this episode delivers practical steps to maximise ROI and align cloud investments with business goals.   Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or www.taylormadesales.com.au

    30 min

  5. 11/11/2025

    E16: Rethinking Enterprise Software Support with Rimini Street

    Is your organisation spending too much on enterprise software support and struggling to innovate? In this episode, we talk with Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street, about how Rimini Street is disrupting the traditional enterprise software support model. Emmanuelle explains why many organisations are looking for alternatives to expensive vendor support and forced upgrades. She details how Rimini Street provides end-to-end support for a wide range of enterprise applications, including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and VMware, helping clients save significant money (up to 90% on total support costs) and free up budget for innovation. Discover how Rimini Street allows businesses to maintain their existing on-premise systems for 15+ years without mandatory upgrades, while also enabling them to leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI on top of their current infrastructure. This approach offers increased agility, greater control over IT spend, and the freedom to innovate on their own terms. This is an episode you won't want to miss. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au   Full Episode Transcript: (Intro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades slightly and continues in the background) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm thrilled to have Emmanuelle Hose, GM and Group Vice President of Rimini Street in the studio today. Hi, Emman. Thanks for joining me. Emmanuelle Hose: Hi Leanne. Thanks for having me. Leanne Taylor: You're most welcome. Now, this is a conversation I've been very keen to have with you. Uh, we've known each other for a while. And for my customers out there that haven't heard of Rimini Street, who are you? What do you do? And why do my customers need to know you? Emmanuelle Hose: Excellent. Thank you so much. Yes. Appreciate the opportunity again. So, Rimini Street is an end-to-end uh support and services organisation for enterprise software. So, if you think about any organisation in the world, they all run an enterprise software to run their operation, right? So, it's a piece of software that run your finance system, your HR system, supply chain, inventory, if you are producing good or or selling any types of good, right? Large organisations tend to run enterprise applications such as Oracle and SAP and Microsoft, you know, this big mammoth uh software that really are the foundation of their business and their whole system. So, very critical for them. But the problem is that they're very expensive to run. 20 years ago, we'd realised that organisations were paying far too much money and time and resources really supporting this application. We realised that there was no alternative, right? So if you wanted your software to be supported, you had to go back to the vendor to have the support. And the support they have, obviously help desk and people helping them with any problem they may have, but also innovation, right? So, the ability to be able to upgrade and and this kind of things. Uh but there was no alternative, and as a result of that, this organisation was making about 94% profit margin on the maintenance, and so very business, right? Leanne Taylor: That's some pretty big numbers. Emmanuelle Hose: Yeah, it is, it is. So, that caused a number of problem for organisation that run this application. They just did not have enough money and to be able to innovate, right? And as you know, as an organisation, you have to innovate if you want to grow, but you have to also manage your cost if you want to be profitable. So, we decided to provide and create an industry that didn't exist, which was the industry of the third party for enterprise application, okay? So, that's what we did 20 years ago. So, very destructive. Uh we decided to change the model completely, and we decided to make it much more relevant to organisation. Everybody is customising this application, for example, right? And the vendor only support their core product. So, we decided to add customisation for no extra cost. We decided to support any version of the software they were running for 15 years plus, right? So, they didn't have to upgrade constantly to be supported. We wanted our clients to have the choice to upgrade if they saw there was a business benefit for it, and they were be able to benefit from innovation. If it's not the case, just stay where you are and do other things that is more valuable to your business, right? So, all in all, what happened is that we decided to do this for 50% cheaper of the vendor, so being able to give money back to our clients straight away for them to be able to fund innovation strategy. And because we're providing a bigger scope of support, our clients tend to save about 90% on the total cost of supporting this application every year, right? So, it's quite significant, right? So that they have more money, they have more resources, they have more time because they don't have to do this upgrade constantly, and they can really spend all their time innovate for the business to be able to grow. Leanne Taylor: So, Emman, tell me about the smaller end of town. So obviously, your large enterprises where you guys play. I do know, or I'm hoping you do, cover the the small to medium enterprise as well. What do you offer that space? Emmanuelle Hose: We do as well. Well, it really depend on the product. So, for example, VMware. VMware, we found can be everywhere and anywhere, all size of organisation, public sector to private sector, and so on. So, we do support any size for this kind of organisation. We've got what we call a flex model, which will allow them to get access to support as well. So, we absolutely do that. And then we've even started supporting startups. Startups that are coming up with wonderful products that are growing very fast, but they don't know how to do support. And of course, if they can't support their clients very well, it doesn't matter how good the product is. So, we provide uh this same level of support, obviously a bit tailored there for them. Leanne Taylor: Oh, that's fantastic. And lastly, on the Microsoft front, talk to me about the Microsoft support. And probably timely given there I think there was a little outage yesterday. Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. That's right. Yes. So, we are expanding this area actually. We used to support mainly the database. Now we support 365, we support Azure, or the cloud, right? And when we talked about the cloud before, you know, as a platform, you know, the cloud infrastructure uh is something that we support. So, we support Azure as well, which is everywhere. So, we keep on growing and adding more solution to provide again a lot of freedom to our client and save them a lot of cost. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. And I was just looking on your website and I'm looking at Salesforce and Workday. There are ServiceNow. So, for customers out there that are looking at saving some money, if you have any of these applications, I'd definitely suggest you jump out and uh let us know and we'll have a chat with Emman around how they can possibly save you some money. So, maybe touch on that Emman in terms of your pre-sales or what a conversation with your team looks like. Is there a review or how how does that engagement work for a customer to understand what's possible with Rimini Street? Emmanuelle Hose: Yes. So, in terms of providing support, uh it's quite simple. It's it's based on what you own today, what you're licensed for. Uh so, the evaluation is very simple. We ask that our clients share what they are licensed for, how much they're paying today, what version they are running, and very quickly we'll be able to put a proposal in front of them and we'll walk them through what it means to change. Leanne Taylor: Break this down for me with an example. So, if I've got a customer that's an SAP customer, and they could be spending, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars a year on their SAP licensing. Talk me through what that looks like for Rimini Street. So, the support is the same if not better with you guys. Explain that whole process for me. Emmanuelle Hose: That's right. So, most organisations have two agreement with the vendor. They've got the license agreement, which entitle them to use the software for perpetuity. And they also have separate to that a maintenance agreement, right? The maintenance agreement is renewed on a yearly basis, and that's the piece that allow you to uh get access to support and get access to new functionality if the vendor continue to invest in this product. What is happening today is that most organisations are not investing in the product that they have on premise, right, with these two different agreement, and they are forcing their clients to go to the cloud. SAP, for example, have said to their client, by 2027, we won't support you anymore. You have to go to my new version of the product, either grow or rise. And organisations don't have the appetite to do that. Leanne Taylor: So, instead, a new build, it's not an upgrade. That's a, is that a complete new? Emmanuelle Hose: It's completely new, exactly right. Exactly right. And you're talking about million, you know, SAP clients

    16 min

  6. 02/10/2025

    E15: Options Around Navigating VMware & Broadcom with Advent One

    Is the recent shake-up with Broadcom and VMware causing you headaches? In this episode, we talk with Talor Holloway, CTO at Advent One, about why many companies are looking for alternatives. Talor explains how Advent One helps businesses update their technology, move away from expensive old systems, and switch to newer, more flexible solutions. This change can lead to better security and save money in the long run. Discover how this move can help your business run better. This is an episode you won't want to miss Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au Full Episode Transcript:  (Intro Music with Voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades slightly and continues in the background) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here and welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. Today in the studio, we have Talor Halloway, the CTO of Advent One. And I'm super excited to be talking to Talor about some of the really cool things they're doing for customers in the tech space. So, over to you, Talor. Who are you? What do you guys do? And why do my customers need to know you? Talor Holloway: Hi Leanne. Yeah, I'm Talor from Advent One. So Advent One's been around for close to 25 years. We're a managed services provider and service provider in general. We've been helping our customers with a variety of different services over that time, but more recently, we tend to be spending a lot of time helping our customers with cloud adoption, Kubernetes adoption, trying to automate their environments and IT processes, as well as build the operating model around some of these new platforms that they're building future applications on, as well as helping sort of modernise and migrate legacy applications to to more modern cloud platforms. So what we find with a lot of customers is that they don't really want someone to come in on on day one and start from scratch. Really, they want someone who's able to come in and accelerate their project and bring a lot of knowledge and existing blueprints and automation patterns and so on into those projects. One of the things that is different about us is that all of the technology that we recommend and service for our customers, we consume internally. So, what we've tended to do is really build out that capability internally, build a lot of automation and things like that that we can come into a project already being part of the way there and really help accelerate that customer's outcome, rather than purely just sending a services person in who's going to have to start from scratch. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So Talor, one of the really cool things I wanted to chat to you today is about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. It's created obviously quite a stir in the in the tech marketplace amongst customers. And I'm interested to understand a bit more, you know, what does it mean? And what are the options available for customers and what have you been doing in that space that you've seen a lot of success? Talor Holloway: For those who may have been living under a rock, Broadcom has acquired VMware and there's been, in certain cases or most cases, substantial price rises and a great deal of uncertainty around what the future looks like. So pretty well all of our customers have been evaluating their options. Not an exhaustive list, but there's essentially you could do nothing, and there's a cost associated with doing nothing. You could look at an alternative virtualisation platform, or you could go into the public cloud, or some combination thereof. And some combination thereof is really the path that we've been going down. So we've looked at several alternatives from a virtualisation standpoint, as well as obviously moving workloads that are fit-for-purpose into the public cloud. Leanne Taylor: And what have you guys at Advent One, what's worked for you? Talor Holloway: We've been a long-time Red Hat partner and have adopted Red Hat OpenShift. So OpenShift is a unified platform that gives you the capability to run containers and VMs on the same platform. So OpenShift is based on Kubernetes. We migrated completely over to OpenShift earlier this year and have seen some really great benefits as a result of doing it. We've reduced our VM footprint by around 40% due to containerisation and was able to have a really good and highly automated operating model for everything else that's been moved over. So one of the benefits, for example, that we saw was we have an internal application that provides all our dashboards and stuff like that to customers, and on VMware that was using like 184 GB of memory across a whole bunch of Linux virtual machines. Once we moved everything over to containers, it's using around 10 GB of memory. So it just shows the significant efficiency you can get by just taking the OS out of the picture. So there's obviously the operating system, the security agents, and all of that stuff that has to run on top of it to make it work. When we're purely just focused on the application, we can gain a significant amount of efficiencies. And our customer onboarding, the time taken to do that has dramatically reduced. Leanne Taylor: So tell me, have you got some customer examples of where you've had some success with customers? And what does that journey look like for them? Talor Holloway: One of the things that set us up well for this was that internal adoption and taking a lot of time to build all of the automation and the operating model around providing a mature service to our customers with OpenShift. What that's allowed us to do is to help customers move not only data centre workloads but also edge workloads off VMware and onto OpenShift. So we're working for example with a retailer at the moment where we're putting an OpenShift cluster in all of their retail stores, as well as helping some customers who have got, you know, data centre workloads and move those from VMware to OpenShift. And we're also helping customers with OpenShift in the public cloud where there's modern workloads that they wanted to deploy, and we're able to have a sort of a unified experience between Kubernetes running in the public cloud and on-premises or out at the edge. Leanne Taylor: So from an end-user experience, you know, the users aren't seeing any change to how they do their job. It's the tech underlying that's supporting the network, yeah? And the cost savings for the customer in how they architect their network, is that right? Talor Holloway: Yeah, so there's certainly the underlying platform has some significant improvements, but from an end-user perspective, I wouldn't say it's exactly the same. In most cases, it's going to be better. So, we tend to use infrastructure as code and config as code to manage all of these environments. So Kubernetes inherently is a complex platform, but if you have the right tools and operating model orchestrating it all, it can become really simple. So if a customer wants to add a new network or create a new virtual machine or configure network policies, configure storage, do disaster recovery, all of that is completely automated using the open-source tools that ship with OpenShift. And for us, even internally, we were able to use those where our time to do a disaster recovery used to take around an hour for us to fail over our data centre, and we can do that in five minutes now, just to give you an example. So when things are really heavily automated and the platform that you're using lends itself really well to that, it makes things very, very simple. Leanne Taylor: So it sounds like customers can work with you guys to kind of alleviate some of that cost and uncertainty if they are on a VMware environment at the moment. So with automation and cost reductions, customers can see some huge benefits. But going beyond the cost, talk to me more about the automation and and some of the operational benefits. Talor Holloway: Certainly. So, we'd normally go into a customer and do an assessment to understand what the target state looks like. And in almost every case, there's either homegrown or ISV software that we can, you know, move out of VMs and run natively on OpenShift, which from a developer experience or the team that are looking after those applications, it's going to make their lives a lot simpler, and they're going to be able to deploy and lifecycle their software in a highly automated way that's very easy. From a VM administrator perspective, the lifecycling of VMs and the overall management will be fully automated as well. So we use a combination of OpenShift, GitOps, and Ansible. So OpenShift GitOps has allows us to manage the platform itself and have that fully automated as well as the containerised workloads running within it. And we use Ansible for for VM management, so that could be provisioning, patching, configuration management, all that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: So what can customers expect to see, I guess, over the next one to two years? A lot have their investments and licensing coming up for renewal. What's the lead time to have a conversation with you about how Advent

    13 min

  7. 12/09/2025

    E14: Behind the Scenes of Tech at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix

    In this episode, we sit down with Clint Watson, Division Manager - Technology, of the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, to explore the incredible systems, infrastructure, and innovations that make one of the nation's largest and most complex events possible. From the track to the grandstands, from data networks to fan experiences – we'll deep dive into the tech that keeps the race running smoothly and securely. This is Taking Tech with Clint Watson – where high performance on the track meets high performance behind the scenes. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact or leanne@taylormadesales.com.au or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au   Full Episode Transcript:  (Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, and I'm really excited today. Um we're doing something a little bit different, and today I wanted to interview a customer as opposed to service providers and vendors. And I wanted to hear from a customer about what cool things they're doing with tech. And I'm really excited that Clint Watson, who is the division manager for the Grand Prix Corporation has agreed to chat with me today. Thank you so much Clint for joining. Clint Watson: Oh, thanks very much. Happy to be here. Leanne Taylor: Wonderful. So we connected on LinkedIn and I'm really grateful that you accepted the challenge to have this conversation today. And I think, you know, in technology, a lot of people enjoy the events that we have around Melbourne. Grand Prix's amazing. It's a, it's a global business. And not often people really understand what happens behind the scenes. So I'm really keen to deep dive into the tech with you today and find out, you know, all the juicy details of what actually goes on and how do we create this amazing event. And you know, I'm sure you've got some amazing stories to share as well. So, firstly, how long have you been doing this for? Clint Watson: Just started my 12th year. Probably started at the right time of year leading into a MotoGP event rather than a Formula One. I would hate to think how I could handle going straight into a Formula One brand new, because it's such a big beast. So certainly cut my teeth at MotoGP and then away we go with F1. Leanne Taylor: And what did that look like? What happens behind the scenes there? And what's the lead up time to an event of that magnitude? Clint Watson: MotoGP is a little smaller. It's very different from a tech build because it's a permanent venue. There's a lot of infrastructure there already in play. The crowd numbers are smaller and it's just a little easier to manage. For me from a, from a technology side, MotoGP is probably about a three month planning, six week build and a two week decommission. F1 on the other hand, that's got significantly bigger over time, but that's almost a, a 12 month of the year planning session if not more. It's a public park. It's a greenfield. In the 12 years I've been doing this, I've never built the same thing twice. So it's a significant challenge there. Leanne Taylor: It's going to be one of my questions. Is it the same setup year in, year out? You know, bump in, get it all set up, bump out again. What, what changes? Clint Watson: There's certainly core elements to it that need to be the same, but one of the beauties of running it out of our park is the fact that we have a clean slate to work with every year. From my side, it is, the build's 95% temporary. And trying to build that in a, in a three month period whilst it's still a public park is a significant challenge. But having a space like that means you are able to to innovate and try new things all of the time. It sort of goes hand in hand with the sport as well, right? F1 is arguably the most technologically advanced sport in the world, and we sort of need to try and keep up with that as best we can. Leanne Taylor: So from the ground up, so what's involved? I'm assuming you've got some connectivity, you've got telcos coming in, you're standing up a data centre or your switches. How, how does it actually come together? Clint Watson: I almost act as an ISP in a way. We do have some some incoming services from my side. My role there is I'm responsible for the design and build of the entire network for the whole site, which includes everything from the outside from uh ticket boxes and gates through to partner activations, hospitality suites, media and photography compounds, governing bodies, all the way through to then running the dark fibre for the teams to come and and build their networks on top of as well. So it's, it's quite a large build, as you can imagine. We would then design the network based on the physical design of the venue, how we structure that, we we very much zone that and try and build it in a way to continually enhance customer experience, patron flow and other bits and pieces along the way. I work very closely with the infrastructure team on how the venue's designed and then and then build what what is required over the top of that there. We deliver services from dark fibre through to cable networks through to stupidly high dense Wi-Fi environments for the international media to work from. And one of the biggest challenges there, you've got about 600 people in a space. We base it on to two and a half devices per person, coming from all over the world. You have no idea or no control of what devices they're going to use and how they need or want to connect. But they need to work and work very quickly and have a very high performing network to do what they need to. It's sort of time is money in this space, and the quicker they get their stories and and photographs out, the better paid they are. Leanne Taylor: Absolutely. And what about the guys in the pits, like the actual teams themselves? I'm sure you've got some interesting stories. Clint Watson: I probably don't. I've always seen them as uh, I build a workplace for them to come and work out of. There's a few, a few stressful moments in, in delivering what they need. They're only here for a short time, their requirements change. So there's certainly a lot of long days in the lead up to getting everything right for them. They sort of come in and pretty much build their own little village that they work out of for the week as well. Once it's done, I try to leave them alone and and just let them do their thing. So I I don't have too many stories on them, but a wonderful bunch of people to work with, I must say. Everyone's very understanding of the temporary nature of it all, the challenges involved, albeit with the high demand of what we do. The world's eyes are watching what we do as well. Leanne Taylor: Of course. Now from the, from a vendor perspective, is this like hardware and software and access points that are just boxed up for, you know, 11 months of the year and rolled out for that, that one event? How, how does it work with the procurement? What are some of the challenges you have getting the support from some of the technology vendors when you are really only using it for a certain period of the year? Clint Watson: You're right. It is all boxed up. We we have a shipping container full of racks of switches and boxes of wireless access points. And as I say, it's different every year. that each device is not used in the same way or the same location every year. It really helps these days with the popularity of the event. You have a look at Formula 1 cars and they have technology company logos plastered all over them. And I'm in a very lucky situation where a lot of those companies also want to work with us. So the support I get from any vendor I choose to work with is above and beyond. We try to be best of breed as much as possible, which is hard and it's hard to justify that cost at times, but it needs to work. The world's eyes are watching what you do and if this network fails and in turn there's potentially no safety system, then the cars can't be on the track or gates fail so people can't get in the venue and it's, it's a big risk. Leanne Taylor: So in terms of, you know, the buzzword at the moment is all AI, cybersecurity. Can you talk about some of the challenges or, or what that looks like in this, in this role? Clint Watson: We're pretty much just starting our AI journey really. So I can't sort of can't sort of go into too much detail on that. We're starting to try a few new things in the accreditation and access control space with AI. We'll see how things go at MotoGP. There's a couple of little things we might unveil there this year. Cybersecurity is huge. Our greatest risk as a business is reputational risk. We are in the public's eyes. For example, a few days ago, we advertised our on sale F1 next year. We've already seen new targeted attacks because of that. It happens event to event. I could pretty much build out a calendar of when and how we would be targeted in in different ways across a 12 month period. My view is defend in depth, which we sort of have to. We have multiple layers covering off every area as much as possible. Yes, there's overlap at times, but I'd rather there be that than than g

    19 min

  8. 12/09/2025

    E13: Australian Made Managed Security with Secure ISS

    Today we talk with Managing Director Paul McIntyre from Secure ISS. Proudly Australian-based and dedicated to supporting small and medium businesses right across the country. At Secure ISS, they believe that world-class cyber protection shouldn't be reserved for big corporations – every business deserves to feel confident, secure, and future-ready. Each episode, we'll explore the latest threats, share practical advice, and learn how you can safeguard your business, your people, and your customers. Whether you're looking to strengthen your security posture or simply stay informed in an ever-changing digital world, you're in the right place. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact leanne@taylormadesales or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au Full Episode Transcript:  [(Intro music) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales, coming to you today from sunny Queensland. And I'm sitting in the office with Paul McIntyre from Secure ISS. Welcome Paul. Paul McIntyre: Hi Leanne, how are you? Leanne Taylor: Oh, much better in this warmer weather. Thank you very much, getting out of cold old Melbourne. I'm really excited to have this chat with you today, and what I ask all my visitors is who are you, what do you do, and why do my customers need to know you? Paul McIntyre: You're right, very good questions. To be honest, so Paul McIntyre, I run a company called Secure ISS. We're based out of southeast Queensland, Gold Coast in particular and uh we do run a a cybersecurity practice and a technical operations practice. So our core offering for what we're doing in this day and age is around sort of managed security operations centre as a service, and we run all of that infrastructure, all of our services out of out of Australia. Our team is Australian based. We're 24 by seven eyes on glass. Leanne Taylor: And that's what I love about you guys. So, you know, a lot of our customers will have had conversations with vendors out of the states or overseas, all offering different bells and whistles, I guess in the security space. What I love about you guys is you're Aussie, you're homegrown, you're based in Queensland, you're Australian made and you're offering your team as a service to customers. So can you explain to me what your security or manage security looks like with secure ISS? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So, so what we've done, our service overall, we've the marketing guys have got a hold of it and called it Lumara. But essentially it's a, it's a service that has a number of tiers across it, a number of technology modules we can plug into the offering and a number of sort of service or people modules that we can plug into the offering. And the way that we've built it out is to to make sure that customers that already have controls in place and and policy frameworks in place that we can sort of augment and uplift those various features across their sort of cybersecurity landscape. So we're not about ripping and replacing the environment as it stands at the moment, it's about augmenting and and taking customers on a journey with that. And that can be anything from that sort of traditional seam piece all the way through to security operations, orchestration and response tooling and then policy uplift and and framework uplift as well. So we're across that sort of gambit and looking to become a true trusted partner to those uh to those clients. To your point about sort of vendors and and potentially overseas companies and the like as well, we've, we've sort of built our SOC from the ground up, so we're not actually reselling another MDR service. We've taken off the shelf software, we've sort of built it out for our requirements and uh made sure that we've sort of got an open ecosystem there as well. So the analysts and and the sales people and the account manager that you're talking to, they've got a lot of accountability and a lot of direct responsibility across that sort of technology tooling and the operational framework that we work within. Leanne Taylor: And what I love is that you really focus on the mid market customers. So that's, you know, your small to medium businesses throughout Australia, and you are nationally covered, which I love. Can you explain how the team, what the service the customers can expect because you're really an extension of their team, right? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So, for a small company, people like to use the word boutique, but I think we we fit that bill quite well. We're small enough that we can customise what we're doing to meet customer outcomes and given our technology heritage as well. So the business itself has been around for about almost 20 odd years and we've had a number of pivots as you sort of do in in technology. And yeah, we've sort of got a significant heritage in the technology landscape as well. So I'm not sure that I've actually answered your question with with what I've just said. You did. The SME piece, right? Yes. So we've made a concerted push into that market space. So in cyber in Australia, you know, for us we come up against everyone. So everyone from the sort of big four Cyber CX to a lot of the small players inside the marketplace. But for us, we think we do a really good job by way of service delivery, we do a great job on on the budget front to really assist that mid market to get a level of maturity that they may not be able to achieve budget wise or uh engagement wise with some of those bigger players. So that's what we bring to that sort of mid market. Leanne Taylor: And that's fantastic because a lot of businesses don't have the depth in their IT teams to be able to, well firstly hire a security manager or or a so, but still have the same issues as large enterprise does when it comes to vulnerabilities, patch management, managed detection, and and of course all the BAU stuff that goes with that. So security is quite a large conversation that we have with a lot of our customers. We spoke recently with a customer around your dark web monitoring. Can you explain what that looks like for you guys? Paul McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. So dark web's an interesting space, right? Especially all the sort of moving parts in cyber as it stands at the moment, but the key part of sort of monitoring activities in the dark web is is sort of being forewarned about information that might be out there. So for those that aren't aware sort of listening to the the podcast, the dark web or the deep and dark web are the information and sites and and components to the web that aren't available to you through a sort of Google browser or they might be sitting behind a paywall. There's a lot of information out there about a lot of organisations and people personally that's just not accessible via Google and it's often moved around and sort of sold on the what's called the dark web. So through things such as sort of Telegram channels, TOR sites, so components that are sort of off the internet and in private networks if you like. So what we are seeing a lot of out there is is sort of compromised credentials, information that's that's been packaged and repackaged and sold across across those components. So we are finding that a lot of customers do not have that information available to them and obviously being, you know, forewarned is forearmed. So if a customer is aware of of that information floating around in the in the deep or dark web, they can actually action that before it might become a a point of compromise for the business or a or a point of exfiltration for for data going forward. Leanne Taylor: And I think I mean everyone, you'd have to be living under a rock to, you know, not hear that Qantas and Telstra and Optus and a lot of big players have been compromised and they have had some data theft go out of their organisation for whatever reason. So it's really important to be able to see and check your own data if it's on the dark web and being sold to potential hackers. So it's something that I think a lot of IT teams focus on security within their network and within their organisation, but you're right, they don't have a lot of visibility as to what their staff data might be doing floating around and being able to be leveraged to compromise their networks, you know, on that bigger scale. So I think that's a really interesting conversation that we've been having with you and it's not an expensive service. Do you want to touch on on how that works? Paul McIntyre: There's a number of layers, right? So and it really depends on a business's sort of focus as to to what that engagement sort of looks like. But uh, you're not sure whether you're you're familiar with info stealers and the and the like that are out and about to to capture some of this information. But that's sort of where our baseline service uh looks at. So info stealers, as the name sort of suggests is malware delivered in a number of sort of fashions that can capture information from essentially your browser, you know, via a piece of malware, phishing attacks, etc. So that's where our sort of service starts and and you'd be quite surprised at the information that sits in those info st

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Welcome to Taylor Made Sales' Tech Talks with Taylor podcast where innovation meets opportunity! Hosted by Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, this series is dedicated to keeping Australian businesses informed about the latest advancements in technology and how they can empower their business. Whether it's discovering cutting-edge solutions, navigating the tech landscape, or finding ways to enhance productivity, Tech Talks with Taylor is your go-to resource for actionable insights and expert advice. Tune in and let's explore the tech that drives success!

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