David van Heerden, Product Evangelist

David van Heerden, Product Evangelist, Episode Summary

In this episode of Automox Insiders, host Maddie Regis interviews David Van Heerden, a product evangelist at Automox. They discuss David's IT background, his role at Automox, and the company's name. David shares his experience in various industries and his excitement about working for an IT-focused tech company. They also talk about the state of ITOps agility and the challenges faced by IT teams. The episode ends with a fun game where David has to identify the fake IT headline.

Read the Automox Insiders transcript

Maddie: Hey there, this is Maddie Regis. I'm the account-based marketing manager here at Automox, and I'm bringing you a new episode of our IT Insiders podcast, which is gonna introduce you to the people behind the product. So today we're gonna talk with David Van Heerden. He's a product evangelist here at Automox. And...

We're going to chat about his IT background, his time at Automox, and we're going to put his ITOps knowledge a little bit to the test. Do you think that over 50 people really Googled "Is Microsoft Word an operating system?" We'll find out. Welcome, David.

David van Heerden: Hey, thank you for having me.

Maddie: Yeah, so excited to chat more with you. Um, could you tell me a little bit about your role and then also the name you'd give our company if we weren't called Automox?

David van Heerden: And yeah, I mean, so the role of Product Evangelist is a weird one to fill, I have to say. I think we got creative trying to figure out what to do with me here. Because a little bit about my background, right, is I spent about eight years at a single company that was involved in a wide range of industries. We were internal IT to that organization, but we sort of set ourselves up like an MSP, where I was head of a lot of our technology product projects across hospitality, construction, development, and some software development as well. So I had a wide range of experience, all the pains across the different spaces, and worked with a lot of amazing technology professionals through all of that stuff. But I was coaxed in over to Automox, this startup that was going to be a rocket ship in short order. And upon joining the team, I was excited to be the customer and lead the IT team for an IT-focused tech company, which I just thought was the coolest thing ever. I'm so spoiled, right?

Um, and, and as such, you know, I kept sharing my thoughts and opinions about things and, uh, they kind of decided to make that official to where I'm sharing my thoughts and opinions to all of you here, as well as the rest of the team here at Automox and yeah, giving Automox and name other than Automox, uh, I think like, uh, the, the little Easter egg within our product is we were "Patch Simple" before we rebranded, but.

We're more than that now. Oh yeah, that's a fun note. You know, every startup has to have some sort of weird name that's like a fake word or something else. So it's gotta have a.ai at the end or a.io. So I mean, I'll go with something really lame off the top of my head of like a strawberry. Berry.io, berry.ai.

Maddie: I didn't even know that. Thank you.

David van Heerden: And then the, the R has got to be replaced with something else. Yeah. We'll figure it out. Ooh, a bear B A R Y.ai. There we go.

Maddie: I love it. Awesome. I love the creativity. I can see why they brought you on. They're like, this guy's got some good ideas. We got to keep him around.

David van Heerden: I'm out. I have a weird process.

Maddie: But give me a little more background so you know you've been in IT for a while. Why did you end up getting into the IT space?

David van Heerden: Yeah, it's funny. It started at my family's church where I spent way too much time behind the drums. And, you know, as a drummer, I'm sitting there listening to the rest of the band in my headset. And again, I had opinions. And so I started to mess with the mix and got involved with all the technology inside of the house there, which someone picked up and noticed that I was this highly energetic nerdy kid just messing with all the tech there.

Uh, so they put, offered me a job in the closet of a small company down in Boca. And I spent my time organizing, uh, old printers and fixing some, some basic stuff, and that's just what got me sucked into it and got me started.

Maddie: For sure, yeah, I'm sure a lot of listeners can relate to organizing old tech. I know I've had plenty of jobs where there's just that like, you know, giant closet of old IT items you've just got to deal with. So.

David van Heerden: I have that addiction to understanding why things work the way they work. And that definitely involved me ripping apart many printers.

Maddie: For sure. And so, you know, you talked a little bit about this, but expand a little more like why Automox? What drew you to this product and this organization?

David van Heerden: Yeah, I mean, originally it was how they recognized the difficulty of, at that time, was just patching. And they had big dreams, Automox still does, has big dreams of solving all of the major pain points for IT people. And so having been so close to it for so many years and also, you know, having a leadership perspective and a lot of empathy for the struggles that we had. I thought it was a really cool opportunity to come in at an early stage while we were still developing the scope of the product and see what I could do to help influence it actually to solve these widespread common issues in IT. So I definitely bought into the passion of our leaders at Automox. And that's why I'm still here.

Maddie: Awesome. I love that. I think that's, that really is what the core of the product is about. So I love to hear that. Um, I am going to switch gears just a tiny bit. You aren't, you're not going to get away from this without me asking you a little bit more of a work-related, ITOps-related question. Um, we recently had a state of ITOps report come out and our stats showed that less than half of organizations report having high ITOps agility.

And the ones that are most agile show, you know, mature uses of AI and workflow automation tools. But why do you think that less than half are reporting that high ITOps agility? And what do you think are the first steps that orgs can take to become more mature?

David van Heerden: Yeah, I mean, I think we often have a mentality that things could always be better. And so a lot of us are very self-critical in general. So usually in the direct question of how great do you think you are, we're gonna be like mid, you know, we're okay. But even in that, I think it's in general that IT teams are under-budgeted, under-staffed and over-scoped.

Um, you know, we're, we're constantly putting out fires and having to deal with things that we were not involved in the planning phases for. Uh, and so we just kind of had to figure it out with what we had, uh, MacGyver, uh, you know, I think was a theme that we used in some previous stuff that I was a part of here because yeah, we're all MacGyver's in that respect. So I think, you know,

Maddie: Yeah.

David van Heerden: The best advice that I can give now, you know, with everything that I've learned and as I'm still learning is that a lot of us in IT and tech security as well, have to shift our mindsets quite a bit. We, we've used to be the black box behind the curtain wizards and in the black box department where inputs were processing that nobody really understood and then outputs, and it was up to our leaders and managers to kind of figure out those relationships and dealing with the outside, the users. But I think we have to shift our mentalities and our mindsets to understand that technology is a part of everyone's lives, personal and professional, and that it's no longer kept within the box or managed behind the curtain. Technology is available and accessible and people are more knowledgeable in how to use it day to day.

So they don't need IT in the old sense anymore. Instead, they need more support and engagement from IT in a collaborative mentality to where, you know, we are reaching out to them and saying like, we have the same goals as you. We want to see you do your job better. We want to enhance your work. And then here's through our area of expertise, how we can enhance what it is you do in sales, marketing, everything else.

Maddie: Yeah, for sure. I like hearing that. Obviously in marketing, we're having to adapt to a lot of the changing technology, but it's also something that we heavily use as well. So yeah, I like that collaborative aspect of it. I think that's a really good way to think about it.

David van Heerden: Yeah.

Maddie: Okay, I got one last thing for you. This is our little fun sort of ending. So I came up with some IT headlines and one is fake and two are real. So this is our fun little game to kind of close it out. I wanna see if you can identify the fake headline. So I'm gonna read three to you and yeah. And then after that, you tell me which one you think is fake. So the first one is.

Over 50 people have Googled the phrase, "Is MicrosoftWord an operating system?" The second one is: "A Startup develops an app to translate cat meows into human language." The third one is, "Unattended computer gets all Windows sounds changed to the Reading Rainbow theme." So which one do you think is the fake one?

David van Heerden: All of these are so believable though. That's, this is diabolical. I would believe you if you told me that someone made an operating system inside of MicrosoftWord because you know, malware gets distributed through that stuff all the time. So I would not be surprised that even people think it is one. And then, gosh, it has to be the startup one with the cat translator simply because I believe that someone made this tool, but I don't think it was anywhere near close actually being a legit startup, a funded startup.

Maddie: You would be right, that is the false one. I had a feeling I was like, I think he'll get it. So there you go. Well done. I wish it was a real thing. I wish I could talk to my cat like a human, but yeah, that is the fake one. So all right. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the pod.

David van Heerden: Nailed it!

Maddie: I'm sure, you know if you want to plug your other Automox pods real quick or where, you know, where people can find you, you can go ahead and do that, and then we'll wrap up.

David van Heerden: Yeah, so please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'll be plugging and posting links to my podcast, the Automate IT podcast, as well as the other podcasts that I'm a part of. I kind of pop up like a gopher in our CISO podcast series and our other webcasts and webinars.

Maddie: Okay, awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on, and keep an eye out for our next IT Insiders podcast. And if anyone would like to get in on that startup for Cat Language Translator AI, you know, feel free to reach out to me. We'll see you guys next time.