Peter Ramer on The MVP Show

[mark]: 1:22
today's guest is from colorado in the united states he's the director at r s m he was first to warder n v p and may twenty twenty two so this year fantastic or actually might be last year on when you're listening to the show he focused on retail and commerce he loves technology and gadgets sounds like a man after my own heart you can find links to his bio socials et cetera in the show notes for this episode peter welcome to the show

[peter_ramer]: 1:50
thank you so much for having me

[mark]: 1:52
good to have you on so colorado is one of the prettiest places in the US isn't it

[peter_ramer]: 1:57
yeah it's it's gorgeous we just have great weather it's funny it will snow and dump and we'll think for sure we're going to have this snow around for a long time and then the sun will come out and it will melt and it be beautiful at just now da a few weeks ago so yeah a

[mark]: 2:13
well

[peter_ramer]: 2:13
very nice place to live

[mark]: 2:15
so i take you're heading into winter now so you're expecting a lot more snow and do you get totally snowed in

[peter_ramer]: 2:22
you usually not so that's one of the nice things you know some of the other places in the midwest it snows a lot and you're just you're snowed in and stuck but fortunately with the colorado weather now we get a lot of snow in the mountains but down in the foot hills we have a little bit more space the sun comes out and the roads clear off and we're all set to play and go to the park again

[mark]: 2:46
nice nice tell me a bit about food family and fun those things that you do and you're not working

[peter_ramer]: 2:52
yeah sure food is great my favorite food is pizza and spagetti so those are always great it helps because i have three kids as well a son um who's seven a daughter who's five and my youngest daughter is two and a half so they keep me busy and it's you know they like pizza and spaghetti too so it works out for for all us um yeah for fun i like to run i've run a little less these past couple of years with the pandemic going on but i like to get out with friends and go for a run enjoy the weather i like to watch movies and n t v shows as well as play with fun little aurduinos which are marked micro controllers i have some here behind but that's where i can kind of incorporate technology you know combine some software into the physical world with some hardware and i find that pretty fun

[mark]: 3:52
so are you like doing her automation with those or or what to use cases

[peter_ramer]: 3:56
yeah sure so i actually don't use those for home automation but i do have kind of hooked up around my house all my light switches hooked up to or alexa app and and all the rest sorry for going off anyone's um you know dots that are there but i love being able to you know climb into bed and just tell you know all the life to turn off or push that button on my phone instead of doing the old dance of you know you turn on your night stand then you go turn off your room like then get back and turn off your night stand so it's pretty fun now even my my kids can tell you know the lights to turn off are the video to pause and that's pretty fun and amusing to watch them being understood as they get older they'll even set timers on each other if they're

[mark]: 4:47
wow

[peter_ramer]: 4:47
you know playing on a tablet or or something they'll take turns and so they'll set timers for themselves when they need to sweat so it's definitely a technology house

[mark]: 4:58
wow that's so cool that's so cool as in my two year old is i think she's just she's just so close to that point of setting the times and things like that i think i saw on my network the other day i think i have two hundred odd devices connected now in my home and my my network extends well outside my house i do my green house is all automated um my workshops all automated i think i've got eleven security cameras outside or wife i you know and then i've got my wire set of cameras as well so yeah i certainly love having the ability to remotely turn on or off anything from anywhere in the world that's very cool

[peter_ramer]: 5:46
it's amazing the you know i find it it's interesting because sometimes you just introduce a new piece of technology to very com situation but all of a sudden it can be a game changer right you know you do something differently and now you never do it the same way again and i just think that's that's interesting times it's a very small you know change of idea or technology and it can make a huge difference to that situation

[mark]: 6:18
so true so true how did what was your journey into into technology what was that pathway for you

[peter_ramer]: 6:27
sure yeah i have to think a ways back now but i think you know we got a computer when i was a kid my dad actually worked for i b and switch from working on electronic printers to software and i you know we got the computer and i love just the idea of being able to play that computer and program so you know i started out some very rudimentary programming not very good but knew that was just intriguing to me that's you know when you think of harry p potter and the wizards you know to me programming is just magic in a way given enough time to program that spell so yeah since then i just practice took some classes in high school again was horrible at it had a lot of help from different friends to figure it out even into call it really was still struggling but knew that's what i wanted to do and so i actually got a degree at university of colorado in electrical computer in engineering and then started working and really just have done software ever since and it kind of based on those early days of having other colleagues meant meet and train me is what got me to the place where i am now of just giving back to those people of going man i sure had you know i sure was blessed by so many people taught me so much it's really fun to be at a point where i can do the same for others and many people i don't even know and i think that's one of the great powers of just social media and the internet and what we can share on line

[mark]: 8:17
so tell me about bring me up to speed about your current role how how you got into that role how do you know how did you get into things like the power platform what was your journey into this area of technology that you're in now

[peter_ramer]: 8:32
sure so i actually started working on dynamics ax for when i first started and yeah it's been a little while and i was part of standard product team with a company called junction solutions and so we would write software to fill in some of the gaps that the software had at that time you know try to sell it for different industries and they'd say well what about this what about this and without those gaps kind of being filled in it was harder at that time to sell the car p systems we really worked on filling in those gaps around call center different aspects so we could sell it and i did that for a whole bunch of years until finally maybe around i don't know over seven years ago now we uh dynamic x twenty twelve or three came out and as part of that we actually sold most at software to microsoft and it was a cool experience we got to work with the microsoft product team members to get our code into the base product and so it's one of my you know badges my claim to fame of okay i've got some code that is now part of the d through sixty five based product goes out to everyone and then since that i transition to manage application services role helping clients directly more support role enhancements et cetera and so yeah that kind of brings me up to speed of where i am now a director with r s m r s m acquired junction solutions about seven years ago largely for our dthrsixtyfive practice and we've kind of expanded from the um and then i could yeah share a little bit about my retail journey as well as you know eventually microsoft came out with a point of sale there acquired this point of sales system from l s retail and they needed some people to figure out this point of sale product and how to use it and set it up so actually flew out to atlant did one of those early trainings and that's kind of a fun side story as part of that same trip my wife's parents live in orlando florida and so i use that trip at the end of it flew down there and actually asked them for permission to marry my marry my wife so i kind of tag teamed that trip but that kind of got me started on retail which is kind of my main focus industry now

[mark]: 11:11
well so you know pass and if you try to acquire pass for customers let's say twelve years ago fifteen years ago it was very hard it didn't seem to sit under the normal dynamic skew set that microsoft as yes it was dynamic or six five boss has that all changed now is that all just part of because like it's not an area that i specialize in but is is that just now one of the scews that that's available in the dynamic suite customers can purchase

[peter_ramer]: 11:43
ah so you can actually purchase it in a few different ways you can purchase license for they call it commerce now they used to kind of call it retail that that word still sticks in their retail commerce but you can actually buy those skees and some of them can even become included for you to use the pass and as well you can actually buy separately so you can just use d through sixty five for commerce it allows you to set up stores and registers and prices and lots of other things to be able to essentially just run the pass or now more recently the commerce platform and so one of the cool things to a few years back our client sat michelle winery we worked with as the first client live on microsouce e commerce platform so it's just one of these dream come truths of years and years back of having this one channel solution really ties in together these different retail channels when yeah so many middle market clients just couldn't couldn't do that right you always had desperate system managing discounts and all the problems and i think thank goodness just even in the last two three years how much change and growth we've seen with our clients just around the sire to have by online pick up in store because of the pandemic and so i to be in think it's definitely been an exciting industry

[mark]: 13:19
since the pandemic is on you know we've seen commerce commerce platform really take off a microsoft are you seeing that kind of adoption where the cut as you're engaging with there's a lot higher interest in the whole commerce story from microsoft i'm going to ask some multi part questions so let's answer that one first and then i'll get into the others

[peter_ramer]: 13:39
sure yeah i definitely think so i mean as you can imagine a lot of clients already have any commerce platform that's kind of been a requirement for a long time so it's definitely taken some time for some of those clients to say okay do we really want to move off of what we have what are the advantages that we get and so i think as microsoft continued to fill out that feature at your doing direct order management at stores and inventory availability all these different advantages that's become more and more attractive for clients to be all in whereas before it was like well okay yes this exists but is it really worth migrating off the systems we have but it has been exciting as more and more client are making that transition

[mark]: 14:30
ha what about the integration to things like dynamic six five marketing right because if you have any real commerce type story scenarios generally you've got the marketing part of the organization driving trap to that and of course that then begs the question how integrated is that story between commerce and then i suppose the other one is does it have its own portal platform or is it using power pages as its main portal or you know because you know if you've worked with mirkrsoff for any period of time like you you know that there's five different products for everything right that's out there rather than a unified type here's a product that you know that all stitches together what's your view

[peter_ramer]: 15:14
yeah it's a good question i think it is that balance of okay at what point do you have too many scows do you like the flexibility or does it now make it ifficult because we're just giving you too many options so we have seen some clients with the marketing others have used their own third parties to you know send out those emails in do that lead generation but i think there's even other components to commerce and point of sale that just keep getting at it on based on what microsophsreleasing so one example is c e so d through sixty five c e right that's been a system that of course been around for a long time but we're starting to see more and more clients say no have this ce platform i want to do that for storing my customers i even want to do some direct placing of sales orders in there so i really need payment to cross between c e be able to take a credit card token a authorization within c e and then send that sales order via duel right into d three six five f n s c so that's just another example where yet more and more of these different skees are becoming integrated and you know as we kind of talked about before with technology it is amazing you just add sometimes that one little bit and that integration adds more options um very easily so it's just a little bit deciding yeah what's best for the way you do business

[mark]: 16:55
nice tell me about your MVP journey

[peter_ramer]: 16:59
sure yeah so i've been really blessed with some fantastic people again who have taught me a whole lot so one of those people was rachel prophet she was an mvp for a number

[mark]: 17:14
correct

[peter_ramer]: 17:14
of years and then she's now with microsoft and continuing to post different articles and videosand doing a phenomenal job there so she actually used to work for the company that i work for now r s m and so she definitely was someone who kind of starting started this enduring journey of going okay how do i teach other people about what it means to be an MVP what it takes to be an MVP and one of the people or a couple of the people that she taught are still with our company don taylor and seth bacon and so i continued to be mentored by don taylor who taught me a ton

[mark]: 17:55
awesome

[peter_ramer]: 17:55
of how how to be successful at training others and i think too right from the get go it wasn't about hey becoming an MVP it was how do we make an impact with what we're doing i think we spend a whole lot of time you know whether writing articles are creating videos um it really should be about how do we give back and of course we want good bang for our work of giving back and then it was just that that except i heard from another MVP earlier on hey if you're you know if you're doing these actions and that comes that's great but it really should be about would you be doing this even regardless of this MVP that was really crucial to remember even when it was challenging and it was a lot of work but i really learned a lot from don taylor she eventually nominated me and then i actually did not get nominated or sorry proved the first time i went up for m v p they said yeah you're not you're not quite there yet and i was like okay that's great and you know that was tricky and at the same i thought to myself well i still have more that i want to write about there's a lot more that i have to share so let's just keep going and then i checked in with our microsophs community program manager christian at the time he's now moved and he said okay we're checking it in and sure enough i found out yeah may first that i was proof so that was that was really exciting

[mark]: 19:26
epic that's so good that's so good the best thing about being an MVP for you is what

[peter_ramer]: 19:32
ah so i think yeah it's that's a tricky question i think the thing that comes to mind just more immediately is the continued community so the existing m v ps have been extremely gracious and kind you know they just invited me into an email group and said hey how can we help you how can we welcome you they've been did you know now nathan class has invited me to speak with him at different community summits and things like that and i think i'm just really blown away around their kindness in that and i think that's been more the immediate need i think longer term i've looking forward to being able to you know pay it forward as you mentioned in your nine d day mentoring challenge one of the last things of pay it forward i'm looking forward to teaching others about you know how they can give back how they can be successful in just even what it's writing blog articles or videos or whatever it happens to be i'm looking forward to that