Mike Kelley & Jeremy Mayfield
Short Clips
Jeremy Mayfield
Jeremy Mayfield came out of school as a fresh engineer and fell into IT back when it was called MIS. As the only IT person at his first company, he taught himself everything, from Cat5 cables and phone-system punch-down blocks to databases, and at one point he was a SQL expert. A leader tapped him early, and he has spent most of his 30 years in IT in leadership while staying hands-on. In 1997 he ran a 3 meg internet link over a 17-mile wireless hop and negotiated free internet by letting the provider use the company's silo as a hop. At a global company of more than 90,000 people, he was a program owner for voice over IP and landline optimization across 1,600 North American locations, work that saved about $11 million in copper.
Today National Sugar, which distributes sugar to companies across the US, runs completely serverless and fully SaaS, with a zero trust framework in place of VPNs. Its new ERP went live on May 1 in under 12 months, against a 14-month board approval, and finished well under the approved budget. It started with a year of defining requirements, including visits to the co-op's members and to 3PLs. A roughly 90-page RFP went to about 10 vendors, Tier 1 and Tier 2, with a hit list every one of them had to answer: anyone who couldn't come back with "here's how we'll do it" was disqualified, and the finalists heard "now you have to show us." Jeremy wanted a vanilla, canned app, which he sums up as configuration over customization, and he phased the rollout to keep scope creep out.
National Sugar was formed from one of the co-op's members about 15 or 16 years ago, and that member was still running all of its IT, ERP hosting included, when Jeremy was hired and told, "your task is to modernize us." His first day on the job was the cutover from the member's Microsoft 365 tenant to National Sugar's own. He took a cautious approach to AI through the ERP project and the stabilization after go-live. Now, with shadow AI already in use across the company, he puts security first and has asked the CFO to realign the budget for business licenses the company can administer and secure. Asked what IT leaders will be talking about in 18 months, he picks the death of the data center, with data spread out like an atom, "all over the place but no place at the same time."
We review circuit consolidation, contracts, security, outage visibility, billing, and future flexibility to reduce chaos without forcing change.
Navigate through key moments in this episode with timestamped highlights, from initial introductions to deep dives into real-world use cases and implementation strategies.
[00:00] Cold open: not ready for change
[00:43] Meet Jeremy Mayfield: the only IT person, self-taught
[03:17] Still hands-on: a 17-mile wireless hop and $11 million in copper
[11:54] Completely serverless, with zero trust instead of VPNs
[13:57] SOC 2 and configuration over customization
[18:32] Pre-built connectors, and an ERP live in under 12 months
[20:59] How the co-op works, and a year of requirements
[27:06] The hit list and "now show us"
[30:37] Five ERP changes, and why organizations aren't ready
[36:15] AI after go-live: stabilize first, then security first
[47:00] "Your task is to modernize us": day one was a tenant cutover
[51:12] The death of the data center, and wrap-up
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