Business as Usual: Excellerent Solutions

Transcription: 

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council and thrilled to have everyone here today to rainy day in Pittsburgh. But that's okay. We continue to plow ahead and make sure that we're keeping our community tightly knitted and making sure that everyone knows what's going on, as well as meeting company's elected officials and understanding all that's affecting us during these surreal times, but many of us are proceeding as business as usual. So Jonathan kersting, is with us today. He is always with us. He's Vice President of Marketing and media, and all things storytelling at the tech Council, we have a chat. And the chat is, you know, for you to ask questions, it's not a time for you to sell your wares. It's just time to ask our guests what they're up to, or any kind of point that you would like to make. We'd like to give a shout out always to Huntington bank, they've been our partners right from the onset. And they've been our partners in many things. And not just business as usual. But they have been with us right from the beginning. They've been helping small businesses, large businesses, through the whole process of the cares act and making sure that people get what they need during this period of the pandemic. So I've also muted your microphones, that's just so that you can, you know, not have any noise in the background. Hopefully, my dogs will not make an appearance today. They have not been behaving very well this week. And I'm not exactly sure why. So if you hear them, my apologies. So today, we have on a bay, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Excellerent. And he is going to be joined by Michael matola, who is new on his team. And we're going to do a little bit of a deep dive and talk to ordinay about, you know, what's up what's Excellerent? How did he start? What's it mean to be an entrepreneur? Where's he from? And I even asked him, What were his first words that he ever uttered as a child, but he couldn't really remember that

it was digital transformation.

It was digital transformation, right? That of Mamaw Popoff

digital transformation.

I want to I want to bring on on a bay. And I want to thank him for taking the time to join us because he's an entrepreneur building business. And he actually comes from Pittsburgh, he's got an interesting backstory that I want to just talk to him about. So I'm going to start with ordinay. And then I'll introduce Mike matola in a moment. So ordinay, thank you for joining us today. You're joining us from your office, right?

Yes, first of all, thank you for having me. You know, again, I am joining joining you from my office, we've recently began to transition back to the office plan. And so so far, we're up to two days a week just to kind of you know, have that cohesiveness with the team. We're in the office two days a week to kind of try to balance between mitigating the the risk, and also moving your business forward.

That's great. That's great. Yeah. I'm glad to share that it's important for everyone to know what other people are doing, and sort of benchmark that and understand the level of confidence as well as sentiment. So ordinay tell us a little about a bit about yourself. So how are you from Pittsburgh? How did you get into this business?

Sure, sure. Actually,

I appreciate that again, thanks. Thanks for having me. I am a Pittsburgh lifer. I was you know, born in Pittsburgh and have essentially been here all of my life. You know, I went to Penn State University. So that was a short stint away from Pittsburgh, but not too far away. from, you know, when I went to Penn State actually went to Baron for initially McKeesport campus, which is now called the Greater Allegheny County. Yes, I spent two years there. And then I went to, to bearing campus up in Erie and spent two years there and I graduated with, you know, a business management degree, you know, back a long time ago. In any event, I grew up in the south side of Pittsburgh in a neighborhood called belt suver. Which is, it's, it's, I guess, a part of what they're called what they call the hilltop it's, you know, there's belt silver knots, Bill Allen towel, and it kind of touches mount all over on one side and Mount Washington on the other. So that's that's where it all started. My parents still live there. I live not far, you know, not too far. And I'm, I frequent the area and continue to work with the community.

That's great. So you work with the community up there, What kinds of things do you did?

Well, there's there's a lot of a lot of grassroots organizations. That, or you know, different programs, you know, for kids, etc. You know, so we like to stay in touch with those organizations and introduce technology and speak to the kids on occasion about, you know, technology careers and try to encourage and create a path, you know, towards technology careers in education. You

know, it's hard, isn't it? It's really hard, because we try, we do a lot of that work at the tech council as well, through our nonprofit 40 by 80, as well as through the tech Council. But you know, what, someone said to me not too long ago, Andre, you're not cool, we need cool people to be nude.

You know, that's a very good point, Andre, because I think you know, a lot of it is, is making that connection, and kind of, like, you know, seeing yourself take that path. You know, again, as someone who's kind of grown up in that community growing up in belt, silver, you know, a lot of your early references are, you know, to success is what you see in your community. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the, you know, more successful folks end up moving away from the community. So it leaves the children, you know, without that level of exposure, you know, so I think it's important to keep those those touch points.

How did you how did you decide that you want to go into business management? How did you decide that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Well, I've always at a very early age, kind of, you know, fancied myself a leader. You know, and a lot of ways, I mean, I've just kind of found myself, you know, whatever the conversation or debate or activity, kind of, you know, leading those conversations, as opposed to follow those conversations. And, and always wanted to kind of, you know, drive that into creating, you know, a value in some form or fashion, you know, for creating my own business, you know, so I remember, you know, even you know, during college, you know, even at, you know, Penn State McKeesport campus, I was a president of the Black Student Union. And when I was an American clampus, I was a president of Association of Black legions. And through those experience, you know, Penn State does a great job of developing leaders, here, there's different leadership retreats, etc, that you have the opportunity to participate in, they had a great, you know, entrepreneurial program at Penn State, you know, when you're when you're doing your bachelor's in business management. So those are some of the early I guess, early tools that I was able to take advantage of, to kind of, you know, mold my roadmap, if you will, or at least got my roadmap into what I wanted to do, you know, moving forward.

And so, there's another term for that. It's called bossiness. Right, which is a good term, right? So you learn that as navigated through some experiences that were at your feet, which is, which is fabulous. So what could you come right out of school? and say, You started Excellerent? or What happened? Oh, no,

no, absolutely not. I mean, it's certainly been a journey, you know, just like, you know, most folks that come out of college, you know, again, you're trying to find your path, you know, find yourself. And that's another thing, you know, again, it kind of goes back to, you know, the community you grew up in, you know, you I think it's important, you know, as I've reached this stage in my career, I think it's very important to have an early path, you know, when you don't have an early path, you don't necessarily check all the boxes to make it easy for you to get there if you need to pivot. And that's one of the things that I've learned through my, my experience, you know, so when I came out of I graduated from Penn State in 93, you know, I got into business management I worked in, you know, believe it or not in home improvements, I work for Sears home improvements and nice, I ran a phone room, you know, phone center, we're generating leads, and how do you manage that, you know, so, it's, it's been a journey, and I kind of, you know, shifted from, you know, from home improvements, I got into software sales, and from software sales got into it services consultancy. And, you know, some are very, you know, some so my first job in IP services was in late 97. And I actually started off as an account manager and kind of got my feet wet and understanding, you know, the landscape of IT services, what are the gaps there? and business was certainly booming back then I remember, you know, getting into it, the everyone was on this path to destruction unless we go in and extend the codes for y2k, right? Back in those days, so it was massive amounts of data, you know, huge, you know, mainframe legacy systems that needed to be, you know, change in order to account for the moment millennial, you know, for the 2000s. So that's kind of where I started my career. So I think it was a very good place because you have that, that insight, you know, back to the, the mainframe world, to the legacy world, and then, you know, again, moving into client server, then quickly thereafter to the, you know, the e commerce boom, in, you know, the whole digitation, digitization of everything was was more or less MRP systems becoming like, you know, standard, right. DRP implementation, you know, to web development now to cloud, cloud and cloud migration, you know, so we've kind of seen the whole, I guess, the whole lifecycle of that, and a big part of my career, you know, what's been consistent across all those different areas, from y2k, all the way till now, whether it's moving into machine learning, you know, cloud migration, etc, has been the need to leverage a global workforce to get it done. Right, you know, early on, you know, it was very apparent that there's, you know, tons of gaps. Initially, those gaps were filled with, as I'm sure most folks in technology would know, for, you know, massive amounts of h1 B's coming into the country to fill the void. Right.

And that, that continues. But as Internet tools and VPN, you know, became secure and standard, then it was quickly offshoring. You know, I think, as early as, you know, 99, you know, I was working with US companies, introducing them to how VPN works, you know, how you can leverage your global workforce, and, and for a very long time that was done out of India, you know, NBS, certainly, you know, dominates that landscape. And my first visit to India was in 99. In fact, you know, so I was a firsthand, you know, witness to the transformation of India, in how they were able to, to leverage their number one resource, which was there, there are people to really transform the country, and do it in a way where it's adding value to a global landscape, right. And one of the in just come to lead into me founding the Excellerent is that, you know, throughout that, that journey, it was just a huge boom. And at some point, however, you know, the market was validated. India, outsourcing became best practice, and the market became saturated. Right. So now, anyone, everyone who's anyone has, you know, a team of 1000 engineers working for them out of India. So became a lot, I guess, the, it became a lot more challenging for for a mid tier in, in, in, I guess, smaller organizations to attract and retain top talent in India. Because suddenly, you're you're competing, you're not just providing opportunities to engineers who don't have opportunity. you're providing opportunities, but you're competing with Microsoft, and Google and Apple and Amazon. And then you have, you know, the fortune 100 companies like Sony and GE, you know, who have massive presence in India, and then, you know, if you're able to get by those guys, and you have the huge consulting firms in India, who have, you know, 10,000 plus employees each, um, you know, so it's become, so that ecosystem, I mean, it's, it's great, because it allowed India to really improve the quality of life of millions of people, increase the wages of millions of people. So now you have this massive upper middle class in India, where 30 years ago that was void. But, you know, it created, you know, challenges with attrition, you know, again, I think when you're looking at, you know, organizations that are looking to leverage, you know, an outsourced model offshore, it's important that they get productivity. And a big part of that is, is making an investment into your business domain, making an investment into, I guess, the relationship and marriage of the organizations. But what I found is that because of the challenge with attrition, you know, we weren't able to give or continue to give our, our clients the biggest bang for the buck. Because by that time, resources ramped up to a certain level of productivity, and you always want to manage towards, you know, a resource offshore approach and the level of productivity that you would find in your own office, right. And that's when you're really getting valued. But what we were finding is, by the time you approach that level, these resources we're moving on, right, they're getting either getting recruited out of organization are getting promoted to other projects. So became challenging, and it led me to explore, you know, two things. One thing, Andre, I found that there was that void, as I mentioned. Secondly, I was a witness the transformation of India, you know, where they were able to create this massive amount, massive middle class, to really drastically, you know, improve the infrastructure of the country, drastically improve the quality of life of 10s of millions of people in country. And then, of course, that economy creates a sub economy, right, because suddenly, you have engineers that are making more money than it could have ever, you know, thought about, and suddenly have this disposable income that kind of creates a simple economy under it. So I took the lessons from that. And it made a very conscious, intentional decision to invest in a, I would say, you know, dare I say, historically impoverished developing country, who have all the hallmarks that made India successful, right, and that is the the volume of educated engineers, right? So we first looked at universities and what they were producing, dependable infrastructure, political friendliness, you know, lack of crime, you know, availability to the US. And, and we started our development center in Addis Ababa, which is the capital city of Ethiopia.

So, wait, so you started the company that,

would I actually so so when I started Excellerent, you know, my vision was to, to actually start in Ethiopia. But you know, but because of just the necessities of running a business. And, you know, depending on the investment that you have, etc, you first need to create value in business, it was enough to keep the lights on, right. You know, so that model, so I didn't start Excellerent, you know, in and the Ethiopia delivery center in parallel, the vision was always there, Excellerent was founded on, you know, for the very purpose of starting a delivery center in Ethiopia. But we didn't start that initially, you know, initially started Excellerent I kind of relied on, you know, relationships and infrastructure that I had in place, you know, for my relationships, we did start with a center in India, and of course, our offices here in Pittsburgh. And we do both, of course, you know, a business in the US, and look at leveraging offshore. So eventually, we started our, you know, after, you know, three years of kind of building our business, building our clientele, building our brand, you know, we were fortunate enough to actually get our kickoff, and kick off our delivery center in Ethiopia.

Wow, so you, we're gonna, we're gonna bring Michael on in a minute. But let's just talk about you have a team of people in Ethiopia, you travel there a lot? do you have?

Yes, Yes, I have. You know, and I don't use this term lightly, but I'll see a world class, you know, team of engineers in our Ethiopia delivery center, you know, from our country director down to, you know, our recruiters or QA, you know, from, you know, from A to Z, we have extremely talented, you know, team in Ethiopia, you know, so right now, we're approaching, you know, about 200. In Ethiopia, you know, our goal for the next, you know, two years is to, is to grow that to 1000. I know, it's an ambitious goal. But again, the idea is to scale it to a point where we're able to showcase to the world where suddenly, you know, a similar transformation will happen where other companies say, Yes, we get it. There's another, you know, preferred destination, and we're able to create jobs at scale in that region. And one of the the differentiators that we're as first movers, we, we have the, the ability to attract top talent. Again, we're not competing with Google in Ethiopia, we're meeting with Amazon, you know, for engineers, you know, we are, if not the top destination, you know, for engineers in Ethiopia right now, you know, so so we're able to really kind of have the pick of the litter. But that's, you know, so that's for for that level of quality. But we've reached a stage where we have an extremely talented core, you know, where we've also, we're also bringing in, you know, young engineers, interns, and we're also continuing to develop that talent Now, on the back end.

So, how are you? When's the last time you were in Ethiopia?

I was actually in Ethiopia for three weeks, starting on July 23. You know, I was scheduled to go there in in March, you know, but of course, COVID hit and we all had to adjust to you know, to COVID you know, one way or the other. You know, in Just to kind of, if I may have that, you know, a COVID sim pack, you know, you know, in March, there were a number of, you know, probably, you know, I'll say three significant, you know, engagements that we were expecting the kickoff that came to a screeching halt, right, oops, you know, we have to rethink this. You know, so we didn't know what the impact was going to be, you know, long term. But after our clients in the market, in general had, you know, a few months to really adjust and understand what COVID meant to their business. And they quickly, you know, shifted, and as of late June, you know, our growth trajectory has taken off, in fact, at a better pace than it was before COVID. Because, you know, companies realize that, you know, again, they have to accelerate their digital transformation, there's adjustments that they need to make to be able to work remotely, to provide services remotely, and cater to the customers in a different way. And the service offerings that we have, allow them to do that, because that's right in our wheelhouse, not only from an expertise perspective, or an OHA perspective, but also, because we have our delivery center in Ethiopia, we're able to do this in a way that provides more value. You know, our, the cost of executing from Ethiopia is probably about one third of what it would be if you're executing from the US, or even less, depending on the nature of the project.

So let's just jump to Michael, let's bring Michael on Michael matola, Michael, you're part of orange team now. And not just in terms of your experience and perspective, because you've done some interesting stints in your life. And anyone can go to his LinkedIn and see the work that he's done. But why are you there now? Like, why are you working with RNA? Now, when you have had lots of interesting experiences, in terms of artificial intelligence, IBM, Watson, IoT, etc. So what are you doing for him now? And why?

So you're hitting on why wanted to join this team?

Really, I'm glad you asked the question, they

already just highlighted for you some of the real and remarkable business differentiators of his business. And we'll always, you know, as we compete with other firms will always lead with those aspects. But frankly, there's lots of companies that could have gone to that had those aspects. This company, both from orny, as well as some of the other really, really talented people that work for him, they have a heart. They have a heart and a soul that you don't find in a lot of companies. And it attracted me at this point in my career, I'd like to impact the world and make a real positive difference, what he just said about expanding from a few hundred to thousands in Ethiopia, what a way to make an impact on the world. Right. And I told them, you know, already, if I join your team, I want to have a chance to help make that change, to help impact that. And a lot of companies we're highlighting in our new webpage, we're going to highlight how we directly contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And we do this company does, I'm really fortunate to join the team of very talented people here. But it gives me the chance my personal journey was gives me the chance to impact those in a very, very direct way. As well as, you know, some control over the rest of my career in terms of building this practice here. Right, this is a great opportunity for me to bring my skills and build a really strong solid practice here. When already said that they have some talented engineers and in Ethiopia folks, they do they have some really impressive backgrounds in the AI space that we're going to expose to the world here very shortly.

So talk a little bit about the US sustainable goals and mentioned that before we jumped on the air. Can you talk about like there's there's two goals in particular? Yeah,

so the UN Sustainable Development Goals, I'd suggest all of your readers or all the visitors here today go out and check that out. There are two goals that we directly contribute to go eight, which is helping build good high tech jobs and historically impoverished areas. And goal 13, which is fighting climate change. You'll see that already in his team of leaders that he has really directly brings, I mean, that is a historically impoverished area and that definition is given on the UN site as a certain amount of revenue or salary per year. Right. And Ethiopia follows falls below that level. In fact, the the last council met in Addis Ababa in 2015, where they develop those goals. So go eight is something that we are directly impacting in a in a very real and tangible way. Goal 13 around climate change. One of my recent posts on on LinkedIn was around the green, Great Green Wall. And I don't know how many people have heard about the Great Green Wall, but it is. It's a it's a mind blowingly ambitious project. You know, to build up a wall of trees, 500 miles long across a continent, just kind of blew my mind. And then I saw a picture, a video of Ernie and Kevin and a couple others and the folks in Ethiopia actually planting 500 trees in contribution to that wall. So it's very cool. It's something that I wanted to join, it motivated me. And it's lots of good stuff in it for me,

there is and you and you come from a terrific background that's been very diverse. So that's, I meant I highlighted briefly, but he actually started his work at Westinghouse. So he actually has some deep corporate roots, as well as consulting experience that he's bringing to this cause. So ordinay this is this is quite a story, right? from a guy who by the way, Jonathan grew up in the neighborhood. Jason? Well, this is this is you have you have an amazing story. And obviously a lot of zest and determination to achieve this. What before we wrap up? There are a couple of there's a couple of comments in here. And there is one question that I want Jonathan to just yeah, just read and answer. And thank you, Michael, for sharing, sharing. And

Michael provides some good vibes for us today, we always appreciate that. And he wants to know, when a person says, Hey, this is an amazing investment in the future of Ethiopia. And in US partnership through engineering, the question is, is the US federal government picking some parts of picking up the tab on this important work that you're doing? He's hoping that there's some sort of government involvement to help you do what you're doing?

Yeah, that's a good question. And the answer is, you know, this, this is an investment that has been, you know, strictly private, it's been 100%. Excellerent, you know, fund it, you know, so it's been self sufficient, you know, till now. And, and, and I like that question, because it allows me to say this, I think it's important that this effort is self sufficient, you know, you know, but I think there's a certain level of, you know, when you look at, you know, trying to make a change, trying to do something transfer transformational. I think the end goal is self determination. Right, you know, it's more or less opportunity, not aid. Right, you know, so if you're looking at, you know, again, for example, you know, what, what aid can governments provide in order to help you do this or help you to debt do that, um, I think there's been, you know, tons of programs that have failed, because they're missing the final piece, which is self determination. So I think what we're looking at it is okay, not that, okay, let's look at how we can help Ethiopia. But Ethiopia has a talent to help you if you're willing to give them an opportunity to add value, right? Because, because we can genuinely add value. So whatever project that you have in technology, we can deliver it, I think, you know, certainly as good if not better, probably more cost effectively, than what you're getting. So without, you know, without stepping outside of your normal, you know, r&d spin or whatever it is that you do, you can get done your, your business goals, while at the same time, helping, you know, as Michael mentioned, you know, the UN sustainability goals, helping to create, create an economy, helping create jobs, help improve the quality of life, you know, our mantra more than anything, is that, you know, again, if, if you have the work ethic, if you have the talent, if you have the aptitude, you should have an opportunity for success. So we're looking at, you know, trying to bridge that, you know, again, where you have talent, you have work ethic, you have the aptitude but not necessarily opportunity, but there's certainly enough gaps, particularly in technology, whether it's needs so we can just bridge the two I think it'll just be a win win, you know, for a for a global citizenship.

Listen, you you have a very interesting and It's really an honor just to listen to someone who has the the intention of giving back to the neighborhood that they came from, as well as taking an opportunity to look at changing the world. And I think that we need to understand that there are ways in the tech community that we can help support and ride along the vision that I think Michael articulated Well, in terms of his own career and journey. So we want to stay connected to you, everyone. We put the site out there Excellerent. And that's how you can find Orne Bay. He's the founder, and probably you can find Mike omotola that way as well, if not on LinkedIn, we're gonna stay close to you. We really appreciate you both taking the time with us. And to stay safe, continue to stay safe. And I'm glad that you're thriving. And hopefully, there are ways that you can become more tethered into the local community as you achieve these global goals. So thank you, Orne. Thank you, Michael. And Jonathan, do we have tomorrow?

I'm pumped for tomorrow, Audrey because we have the one and only Pete de como from a long this guy's been helping out. The teen years. Great story

here about chemo lung tomorrow. Yes, everything he's been doing particularly in COVID. So thank you, ordinay. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Stay safe, and we will see you here tomorrow.

Thanks again for the opportunity. Laurie, thank you so much. You're very good bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai