Welcome to “The Horse’s Mouth” with Tom McManus, a unique talk show where guests belly up to the bar to discuss business, technology, marketing, and life. No gossip, no hearsay, no BS, just the straight-up truth, right from the source.
Tom’s longtime love of bartending has come full circle since his days as a linebacker on the inaugural Jacksonville Jaguars football team—slinging drinks and talking shop with everyone from high-profile sports figures and entertainers to business leaders, journalists, and community leaders. Tom and guests trade insight and anecdotes, explore day-to-day topics and tackle the hard subjects, all with equal measures of energy, honesty, and laughter. Get the skinny on the real people behind the headlines, straight from the horse’s mouth.
This week, Tom spoke with James Lampke from Robert Half Technology, Jeff Hootselle from Auditmacs, David Webb from BrightMove, Mark Bishop from TSYS Global Payments, and Andrew Harbert from Perficient, Inc.
How is COVID-19 affecting your business?
Andrew Harbert
We’re a technology solutions company. I’m on a project with Florida Blue now, helping out people writing their applications and getting those out to the public.
Jeff Hootselle
Software is big, especially software as a service. It’s a space we live in every day. With all the work from home stuff that’s in the news, software is the key component. So, the cloud is dominating everything. Software is what is enabling a lot of businesses to keep running.
David Webb
For 16 years, we’ve been writing applicant tracking systems that run staff and companies and HR departments. We were recently named the number one applicant tracking system overall. There’s a lot of H.R techs specifically in the North Florida area. You can trace it all the way back to the 80s when AT&T put a big call center here and the staffing industry gelled around it to make that happen.
Jeff Hootselle
We’ve been talking to a company just over the last couple of days to help them migrate a 500 person call center to the cloud. The technology’s been there for a long time. You’ll see more and more of that now, people with their eyes opened up to what’s possible and the ability they have to scale out their workforce, to work remote, to not be confined to just this geography. You can hire people in Texas or Alabama or workers overseas.
Mark Bishop
You really want to make sure your technology can take hits like this, it is a huge area right now for test automation. You want to be testing chaos engineering, put gremlins into your system essentially and exercise getting them out. If a network card goes down, or connection or server itself goes down you want to know how that will impact the entire system. These are things you should do in order to be prepared for situations like this. This is going to be a big test, especially for companies who haven’t been stress tested like this before.