Henry Park: Redefining Convergence Technology Globally

Henry Park: Redefining Convergence Technology Globally

Persistency is an essential attribute that every entrepreneur should possess.

Comprehending the aftermath of failures and coming up with a better ideological approach aids in the sculpting of a leader.

The success of an entrepreneur resides in an all-encompassing strategy to make the most of each venture. To illustrate the varied abilities of a successful leader, CIO Look presents Henry Park, the Founder, CEO and Chairman of Board at 3GC Group, an exceptional entrepreneur and IT indust leader.

Following is Henry’s story narrated in his own words, and possessing the potential of inspiring and motivating everyone.

Success as a leader in any industry requires a lot of mistakes and learning from those failures. A leader’s primary function is to focus on a long-term vision and mission, making sure that the bumps on the road don’t distract from that vision, and a leader’s team depends on that adherence. Our mission at 3GC Group —to focus on providing high-value services to our clients through a consultative approach, our clients’ needs to augment their existing teams, and helping to achieve the goals of our clients—has remained consistent through a decade of growing our business. Today, instead of a traditional service client model, our operations, communication, and processes are very well aligned with our customers in partnership. Along the way, we’ve hit our fair share of obstacles, some of our own making, but continuously adjusting our steering

towards that singular goal of alignment with our customers has proven critical to our success.

For example, in 2009, we decided to enter the mobility space and take it to the enterprise market. It was a great step towards our early vision of expanding our UC practice into a fast growth converging technology but we made the big mistake of focusing on product versus consulting and development. We spent 70% of our marketing and sales budget on this endeavor pushing a combination of boxes that clients weren’t ready for because they needed a business applied standard and approach to wrapping business operations on mobile devices first. By the time companies were investing in mobility infrastructure, they were following the consultants that helped them prepare the organization. We wasted two hard years in this endeavor. In hindsight, we would have had success focusing on business process consulting than selling boxes.

In 2012 we decided to enter the world of physical security seeing the convergence of storage, IP video and access control on enterprise networks. At the time, the majority of our clients were in the private sector with a focus on finance, technology and retail industries with no experience in the public sector. But with the big projects being in schools and government campus projects under facilities budgets, we decided to focus our sales marketing there. We wasted another 2 years trying to compete in a space we weren’t accustomed to with clashing cultures and missed workflows. In hindsight, we should have focused on selling a physical security to IT departments and not changed focus.

What has served 3GC well, through our mistakes, has been a driving philosophy called e-cubed. From our earliest years, we fundamentally changed our engineering model from the traditional method of network engineers or converged technology engineers that are singularly focused, to a requirement for our engineers to achieve core expertise in critical network infrastructure or systems infrastructure, and adding experience and expertise in converged or critical technologies outside of their core skillsets. This change in our engineer model is what we call e-cubed.

With a clear vision for how 3GC Group needed to provide services to enterprise clients, we diligently and frequently conveyed to our clients, vendors, partners, and employees, not just what is required, but why such practices are important. This continuous effort in communication and consensus to achieve a shared vision is what drives 3GC Group’s employees, vendors, and partners towards a genuine effort to help clients achieve larger business goals through

information technology. And this clarity of business framework, continuous messaging, adaptability, is a critical component in leading an organization through multiple levels of growth. A business leader in the fast-moving IT space needs to find, through the interplay of vision, communication, and research, what will become status quo in the future, not what the status quo is today. That e-cubed vision for technology convergence, along with our mission of providing consulting value to our clients has never wavered. Ultimately, what we learned from our previous mistakes is to focus on consulting first, not selling boxes.

Our convergence vision has led us from our earliest UC practice days, through our mobility mistakes, to evolving into partnering with our clients for a DevOps, DevSecOps and network automation practice. We’ve combined this practice with a critical adjustment in our partnership process to focus on workflow consulting first, products second. We’ve also incorporated this practice with physical security and multifactor authentication, learning from the complex integration projects of converging and migration, access control, and video surveillance, all falling under the central concept of user access control. The earlier integration model was a precursor to our converged authentication practice where we are integrating AD, SSO, physical security and various MFA solutions into security workflows. Each solution discipline we’ve trialed and learned from has become a peripheral practice around our core architecting and design consulting focus. We’ve taken what we’ve learned on mobile app development and converged authentication to put together 2-3 year roadmaps for enterprises to automate their development processes and expand this into security operations working with CIO’s and internal teams.

As one example, chatbot technologies utilizing natural /contextual language to cover common IT questions like password resets, integrated into unified communications systems can lower IT help desk calls by 30%. Developing M2M communication software allowing behavior based machine learning cyber security monitoring solutions to send alerts to proactive cyber defense solutions allows automation and real-time blocking of zero-day malicious activity. Development of artificial intelligence software integration with video content can allow rapid meta-tagging of video content for future video content searches. These are just a few examples of the power of developing solutions to integrate newer technologies with existing platforms to optimize critical business operations.

The future of IT is exciting, filled with new potential to achieve levels of technology integration into business operations far above what is being seen today, but is also fraught with new potential challenges and risks on the horizon. As artificial intelligence continues to improve, as systems continue to move into the cloud, new security solutions rise to meet the challenges of an evolving security landscape, how 3GC Group will manage these challenges will also continue to evolve.

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