Three years after adopting Rewst, Net Friends CEO John Snyder and integration engineer RJ Madsen talk about what's changed since, and what they're looking forward to in the next generation of the platform.
Introductions
John Snyder, CEO, Net Friends Incorporated: "I'm John Snyder, CEO of Net Friends Incorporated."
RJ Madsen, Integration Engineer, Net Friends: "Yeah. I'm RJ Madsen. I'm the integration engineer at Net Friends."
Before Rewst, and building the integration team
John Snyder: So, about 3 years ago, before we adopted Rewst, we had a diffuse set of scripts and things that you could call automation, but they were they were little pieces and they were tucked away and hidden and scattered around our business. We got Rewst which gave us a focal point and then Joel started to build an integration team. We built it around RJ. Once automation's been in your culture for a while, non-technical teams start coming in and seeing it as a as a solver or as a way to get things done. For me, that's when I knew this this is deeply embedded in the in the company in a in a in a wonderful way.
RJ Madsen: So for the next generation of Rewst, I'm very much excited for the ability to quickly generate like forms and the app platform dashboards. So I'm really hoping, you know, with Rewst being the the central point of our data that we can, you know, use the the new next generation of Rewst to to really get some insights on top of all that data.
What's next: granular control and AI-assisted workflows
John Snyder: Yeah. Some things I'm excited about with the next generation platform is it felt to me like there was going to be more granular control, more opportunity for other members of our team who are not in the integration team to potentially, you know, they would need a little bit of training. I think everyone benefits from understanding the basic rules of the road, but they'd be able to go in and using the AI components, draft an automation and a workflow and one see if it works, kind of get a sense of how it all comes together and then offer that to the integration team to say, "Hey, what do you guys think?" Probably get some refinements. Now you have a we're much further down the road with than like a Slack message saying, "Hey, I have this idea." And then you need to try to unpack it a bit. So there's some real potential for additional ideas to come in and they're further developed. They're further along. And yet we still have control. It doesn't feel like we've just like opened things up and it's going to get wild and crazy.
Confidence in where the platform is headed
RJ Madsen: Yeah, I'll add on to that a little bit with the like building but not publishing, not putting things into production. I am looking forward to that being able to step like further into this engineering architect role of having people submit their ideas and then we can sit down together and walk through them, design them. I do enjoy like the teaching aspect of it as well.
John Snyder: So I feel I feel like this is a really well-considered next generation platform. I thought you Rewst just thought through so many things. We saw hints of it a year ago and it's matured so much and it makes me feel like we can expand automation within our MSP much further than we could with the existing platform.
